Lærke Cecilie Anbert

Starting in June 2026, I will join the DFF-funded research project Educational Optimism as a postdoctoral researcher. The project is led by Laura Gilliam and also includes PhD student Maria Isabella Apadana. Together, we will explore how minority ethnic youth navigate educational institutions, aspirations, and everyday experiences of belonging, opportunity, and inequality. 

I come to the project with a background in anthropology and gender studies, and I recently completed a PhD focused on student activism in higher education in the US. My research has broadly centered on questions of power, education, democracy, social justice, and belonging, with particular inspiration from feminist theory, critical race studies, and the anthropology of education. Across my work, I have been interested in how institutions shape people’s possibilities and orientations, but also how people challenge, negotiate, and transform institutions in everyday life.

In the project Educational Optimism, I look forward to continuing these interests through a focus on institutional habituses, hidden curricula, and hope as an everyday practice. I’m particularly excited to contribute ethnographic and analytical perspectives to the project while learning from the collaborative work with Laura Gilliam and Maria Isabella Apadana. I hope the project will generate new insights into how young people experience education as a pathway to opportunity, shaped by expectations, inequalities, and possibilities for social change.