Trine Brinkmann

Research and development areas

I am a trained anthropologist, and before that a social worker, and I research themes related to migration and mental health. I have a profound interest in the relationship between state interventions and intimate spheres. My methodological foundation stems from ethnographic fieldwork, and through that, I investigate social life and its connections to those institutional contexts and places in which it unfolds.

My PhD was conducted in collaboration with the Danish Refugee Council and focused on psychosocial work with children in refugee families. Here I was particularly engaged with intergenerational relationships and the moods and atmospheres that surround sensitive topics, in schools, at home, and in welfare state knowledge dissemination.

In recent years, I have been dealing with internal migration practices among socio-economically disadvantaged people, not least from city to countryside. I have investigated the inclusive and exclusive dynamics produced by housing markets – understood as both homes, infrastructure, and sociomateriality.

Currently, I am involved in the research project, 'The complexity of coercion in child and adolescent psychiatry'; an interdisciplinary project that examines the use and experiences of coercion in Norwegian youth psychiatry. My role is to contribute insights into both how and under what circumstances coercion is used, and how professionals, young people, and their relatives experience it.

I am very engaged in working and communicating across literary genres. Among other things, I have co-edited the short story collection, ‘Levn efter personspecifikke aktiviteter – Socialrådgivernoveller' and am part of the editorial team at AntroStorier, a digital magazine that publishes ethnographic fiction.