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Welcome to the Migration Seminar

Title

“Tough skin” and “A buzzing feeling” – VET-students' experiences of harassment in their training workplaces through poetic and metaphorical analyses

Profile

Katrine Thea Pløger Nielsen, doctoral student at the Centre for Youth Research, Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University Copenhagen

Attendance

This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05. If you have any questions, send an email to mim@mau.se.

Zoom-link will be available closer to the seminar date.

 

Abstract

In this presentation, Katrine Nielsen, doctoral student from the Centre for Youth Research, Aalborg University Copenhagen, will present and discuss her preliminary findings.

Katrine is investigating young VET-students' (Social and healthcare, waiter, chef students) understandings of, experiences with and reactions to negative behavior, harassment and discrimination at their training workplaces. Current empirical data consist of 29 in-depth single interviews with students.

Katrine will show examples of and discuss her two ongoing analyses using poetry and metaphors. “Tough Skin” is a metaphorical analysis of how VET-students experience the need to develop “tough skin” in order to be a student in an industry where harassment and discrimination is well-known. In contrast to tough skin, the students can have ‘sensitive skin’, which implicate that you are a victim and easy to offense. From the student's perspective, tough skin is a learning process, a way of becoming in their profession.

”A buzzing feeling” is a poetic analysis (using poems) of the continuum of different experiences that students have and their very different reactions to it. Through poetry, the aim is to make room for the nuances and dilemmas. At the same time, the aim is to awaken new and different emotions in the reader in a field where a tough culture is normalised. In Danish Katrine works with the word “Summen” that both refers to a buzz, the sound of a bee, but also to ‘a total’.

The doctoral project creates qualitative knowledge about young Danish VET-students experiences with, reactions to and thoughts about negative behavior, harassment and discrimination at their training workplaces. The project's empirical data consists of qualitative interviews with social and healthcare students, waiter students and chef students under the age of 31. Katrine is currently working on processing empirical data through poetic inquiry and metaphorical analyses.

The thesis is article-based. Project runs until August 2026.

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