PROJECTS AND RESEARCH

Museum work is about much more than exhibitions. In its day-to-day work, the museum collaborates with universities, external partners and civil society to generate knowledge and develop new methods within our field. These may include projects examining how religion is communicated in museums, the integration of newly arrived residents, or projects that more actively focus on developing the ways museums communicate and reach new audiences.

Here you can find a small selection of the interdisciplinary projects and research contributions that the museum has been involved in over the years.

GRANSK – JOURNAL OF NORTH ZEALAND’S PAST AND HISTORY

GRANSK is an online journal about the past and history of North Zealand, made available by Furesø Museums, Museums of Elsinore, Museum Nordsjælland and Rudersdal Museums. Articles published in GRANSK are peer-reviewed within the fields of archaeology, ethnology and history, and everyone is welcome to read and reference the articles. The journal is run by a number of museums, but the editorial team also welcomes articles and topic suggestions from individuals and institutions outside these museums.

Read more about the journal and explore the articles here: http://gransk.dk/.

THE SEEKING HUMAN BEING (2026)

How do people find new directions in life? What happens when beliefs, values or worldviews change? Based on personal stories about searching for new spiritual or religious paths, the project explores the diversity of modern forms of belief. Some people have actively converted to a religion, while others have moved in more personal or alternative directions – without necessarily using words such as “religion” or “conversion” themselves. What they share is an experience of change and searching.

Through interviews, we meet people who share their experiences of breaking with the familiar, asking questions and finding new ways of understanding themselves and the world. At the same time, we collect and document objects that have played an important role in their journeys – ranging from religious symbols to everyday objects of particular personal significance. Together, these stories and objects provide insight into the diversity that characterises modern faith and spirituality today.

The project will culminate in an exhibition at Farum Kulturhus, which will be shown in autumn 2026.

IN THE PAST WE MADE HISTORY (2026)

The year 2015 marked the beginning of a new paradigm shift in Denmark: over the past 10 years, we have moved from relative openness towards people with refugee experiences to a gradually more restrictive approach. This societal change forms the basis of the digital archive ‘In the Past We Made History’ by photographic artists Tina Enghoff and Kent Klich. The archive grew out of extensive documentation work concerning the historic influx of refugees between 2015 and 2018. Enghoff and Klich have revisited 89 former asylum centres and emergency accommodation sites, photographing buildings, rooms and surfaces – physical traces that disappear over time. A significant part of the archive has been created together with people with refugee experiences, who have actively participated in selecting photographs and deciding what should be preserved. In 2025, Enghoff and Klich entered into a collaboration with the Immigration Museum involving the transfer of the archive and its metadata to the museum’s collection, as well as the development of an artistic and documentary leporello that will be exhibited at various venues around the country.

Supported by the Augustinus Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, the Wisti Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation.

RETURN TO UNCERTAINTY (2026)

For many years, migration and integration in Europe have received considerable attention. Less attention, however, has been given to the reverse phenomenon – repatriation, i.e. when foreign nationals or their descendants return to their country of origin. The purpose of this project is to investigate how returning migrants experience their linguistic and cultural identity in their country of origin. We aim to explore how language skills, cultural experiences and perceptions of identity develop in connection with repatriation.

It is particularly interesting to examine how returning after many years in Denmark is experienced – not simply as a geographical move, but as a profound change in an individual’s life. The project therefore aims to explore how repatriated people experience life in their original home country after an extended period in Denmark, from several perspectives:

Personal: How does returning affect their self-understanding, sense of belonging, use of language and feeling of home? How do they experience rediscovering – or losing – a connection to the country they once left, particularly after having built a life in another country?

Cultural: How do they navigate between the cultural references they acquired in Denmark and the culture to which they return? How do they relate to traditions, language, norms and everyday life in their home country after years in Denmark, and how do their identity and cultural self-understanding change in the process?

Social: How do they experience their reintegration – socially, economically and within their families – in their home country? What is their position in the local community, labour market, family and social network after returning, and what challenges and opportunities do they encounter during this transition?

By focusing on these aspects, the project contributes to a nuanced understanding of how repatriation, migration and “homecoming” can be experienced as a complex, multi-layered process rather than a completed movement.

MIGRATION IN THE NORDIC REGION (2025-2026)

History is full of examples of migration – forced by politics, war or climate change, or voluntary due to love, education and work. But do we always follow up on the outcomes of migration and integration? Do we always learn from these examples, and do we always build inclusive societies that are attractive both to newcomers and existing residents? In this project, the project partners (Kivik Museum, Swedish Homeland Association of Finland, the Department of Culture in Landskrona, Association of German North Schleswigers and the Immigration Museum) will create a small exhibition with an exhibition catalogue exploring inclusion and integration in order to increase knowledge about questions such as: How can we build welcoming societies for the future with the aim of achieving successful inclusion, regardless of whether the reasons for migration are forced or voluntary? How can we, as public institutions, help change traditional views of immigrants as people who need to be “integrated” towards seeing them as people from whom we as a society can also learn? We want to draw conclusions and learn from examples from history and contemporary societies about how migration and integration work, and communicate this knowledge through an exhibition and a conference.

GENERATION II – CHILDREN OF THE GUEST WORKERS (2025-2026)

The Immigration Museum has received financial support from IA-sprog for a new project focusing on the children of guest workers who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. The overall aim of the project is to document the experiences and challenges this generation encountered in their school, working and everyday lives. It is an important contribution to a more nuanced understanding of multicultural experiences in Denmark and a chapter of our shared national history that should be preserved. The project will also contribute to developing participants’ and users’ historical awareness by involving them in collection, preservation and communication work.

The project is a continuation of the collection initiative Guest Workers – Stories from the 1970s from 2022/23. This collecting initiative focuses on the descendants of former guest workers who were children or young people during the 1980s and 1990s. The initiative aims to document the experiences of, reflections on and memories of childhood and youth among descendants of immigrants who came to Denmark as guest workers in the 1970s. They have often been understood as the ‘second generation’, implying that they are the children of ‘the first’ members of their family to arrive in Denmark.

MOSAIK – STORIES OF MULTIPLE HOMES (2025)

At the end of 2024, the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces awarded funding for a new project between the Immigration Museum and MARK | Museum for a New History of Denmark, focusing on people affected by migration who find themselves at a multicultural crossroads. The project builds on the knowledge and experience gained from the ‘Co-created Collections’ initiative carried out by the two museums during the previous year.

‘MOSAIK’ is based on co-creation as a method. This means that the museum does not define the content and direction alone, but instead creates a framework that enables participants to actively contribute their own experiences and perspectives. Through workshops, shared activities and exhibition production, participants and museums work together to develop mobile ‘MOSAIK’ exhibitions. These exhibitions function both as forms of communication and as shared working spaces in which relationships, stories and objects emerge throughout the process. The project thus investigates how relationships, communication and collecting can be understood as one integrated practice rather than as separate tasks.

In ‘MOSAIK’, the Immigration Museum focuses on stories about home and identity among young descendants of immigrants (aged 15–30). The aim is to collect tangible and intangible testimonies together with the target group. These testimonies can be communicated to a wider audience to provide a more nuanced understanding of having multiple senses of home and, in the long term, be preserved as part of our shared history for future generations. The insights and perspectives of the project’s target group are currently underrepresented in Danish museum collections, including those of the Immigration Museum, and are therefore also missing from the national historical narrative and cultural heritage. To create more pluralistic and democratic museum collections, it is therefore necessary and essential to collect and preserve testimonies from this target group before they disappear or are transformed by the passage of time.

The project highlights a number of key insights:

• Rethinking collection practices: If museums want to be relevant to more people, this requires not only new forms of communication but a fundamental rethinking of how collections are created. The project points towards a practice in which the collection is not a closed system, but something that develops in dialogue with the people it is intended to represent.
• Communication generates collecting: When participants work with specific communication products, their motivation to share their own stories and objects increases.
• Relationships are essential: Trust and a sense of security are prerequisites for participation and for personal stories to be shared.
• Co-creation requires new skills: The work involves managing complexity, emotions and unpredictable processes that have not traditionally formed part of museum practice.
• Collecting is not neutral: What is collected is shaped by relationships, frameworks and participants’ own understandings of what is significant.
• Openness creates both value and responsibility: Co-creation opens up new perspectives, but also requires ethical awareness and clear facilitation.

MOSAIK has resulted in:

• Co-created, mobile MOSAIK exhibitions
• New objects and stories for the museums’ collections
• Methods for co-created collecting and communication
• Data on the target group’s perception of the relevance of museums
• An article and knowledge sharing in professional museum forums

Learn more about the work in the report MOSAIK – Stories of Multiple Homes by Emma Barnhøj Jeppesen, Isabella Balanchi and Sandra Wibroe (2025), or in the joint article The Collection – the Museum’s Undemocratic Practice? by Anna Louise Siggaard, Emma Barnhøj Jeppesen, Isabella Balanchi, Liv Köhne Lind and Sandra Nicole Wibroe.

CoRaL – DANISH CONVERSATION READ ALOUD DATASET (2024-2025)

In collaboration with the Alexandra Institute, Furesø Museums has become a new partner in the nationwide CoRaL project, which focuses on dialects in Denmark. The project collects speech datasets containing recordings of the dialects and accents of more than 1,000 people from across Denmark. The recordings will support the development of Danish speech technology so that computers and artificial intelligence can better understand spoken Danish and respond appropriately in a Danish context. The dataset will be made freely available to everyone, allowing developers, businesses and public institutions to benefit from the new knowledge.

“We are very pleased that Mosegaarden, Furesø’s local history museum, will provide the setting for such an important and significant project. We hope that residents of the Furesø area will support the project and lend us their voices so that we can help ensure the development of tomorrow’s speech technology,” says Museum Director Cathrine Kyø Hermansen.

As part of the project, Furesø Museums and the Alexandra Institute are currently looking for research participants from the Furesø area who would like to donate their voices through voice recordings. The recordings will be used to develop and improve voice assistants and chatbots for, for example, blind people, older people and citizens with special needs, while also helping Danish researchers develop technologies for the benefit of everyone. The recordings will take place at Mosegaarden, Skovgårds Allé 37, 3500 Værløse, on 8–9 January 2025. Participants should expect to spend 2.5 hours reading texts aloud and taking part in conversations with other residents. Both activities will be guided by staff from the Alexandra Institute. As a thank-you for their help, all participants will receive a DKK 400 gift card.

DANISH-PALESTINIAN VOICES (2024-2025)

From previous experiences, including our work with Ukrainian refugees and evacuees from Afghanistan, we know that it is essential for the museum to be present when new migration-related events arise and unfold in a Danish context. This is particularly important for preserving tangible testimonies – objects – that might otherwise disappear or be forgotten if they are not collected and preserved in the museum’s storage facilities.

On a grey and overcast Sunday in October 2023, a demonstration in front of Christiansborg, where up to 15,000 people had gathered, marked the beginning of a new contemporary collecting initiative focusing on Palestinians in Denmark. Homemade signs and flyers in shades of green, white, black and red were collected from the cobblestones, while photographs and video recordings document the thoughts and words shared among the demonstrators. These testimonies are now being incorporated into our collection, where they supplement the relatively small number of existing objects relating to Palestinian history. What else the collection will eventually contain remains to be seen. But the first small step towards documenting this part of our migration history has now been taken.

CHILEAN TESTIMONIES (2023)

On 9 September 2023, the Immigration Museum held a memorial ceremony for Chileans who disappeared during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The event was organised in collaboration with Danish-Chileans to mark the 50th anniversary of the coup.

The memorial ceremony also led to a desire to collect Chilean testimonies for the Immigration Museum’s collection, ensuring that these testimonies are preserved for future generations and incorporated into the broader history of immigration in Denmark.

The collecting initiative has emphasised a broad perspective across generations. This means that the museum has collected testimonies not only from Chileans who came to Denmark as adult refugees, but also from their children.

CO-CREATED COLLECTIONS (2023-2024)

At the end of 2023, the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces approved funding for an entirely new partnership between the Immigration Museum and MARK| for a project focusing on sustainable collection management.

The institutions will receive a combined total of DKK 1.4 million over the following year. The funding will be used to rethink the concept of museum collections and explore new ways of working with social and cultural sustainability in collecting and preservation practices – all in close consultation with Conservation Centre Vejle.

The aim is to strengthen cultural and social representation in our collections. Among other things, we do this by challenging the traditional concept of the museum object, with an increased focus on intangible and place-based cultural heritage, while inviting people who do not normally use museums to identify, assess and contribute their perspectives on cultural heritage.

The project develops new strategies and methods for museum collection work and sustainability initiatives through contemporary documentation, co-creation and the inclusion of museum non-users. Through the project, the museums aim to challenge collection paradigms and definitions, bring people together, create value and ownership for non-users, and develop methods for sustainable, ethical and co-created collection management that can inspire the wider museum sector.

In recent years, both MARK| and the Immigration Museum have revised their collection strategies and collection management, including a renewed focus on challenging the traditional concept of the museum object, rethinking understandings of museum collections and testing new methods of active collecting. Based on this shared foundation, the two museums will use the ‘Co-created Collections’ project to actively explore and integrate contemporary documentation and co-creation as methods in their work – particularly with the aim of creating new ways to include museum non-users and thereby ensure broader representation in museum collections, communication and research.

Read the Handbook for Co-created Collections.

LØRDAGSSYSLER: INTEGRATION FROM A MUSEUM PERSPECTIVE (LIM) (2023-2026)

With a grant of almost DKK 190,000 from the Sportgoods Foundation, the Immigration Museum launched a new project in the summer of 2023 that explores integration from a museum perspective. The project further develops the community-building initiative Lørdagssysler, in which women from different ethnic and religious backgrounds meet for workshops and conversations centred on their shared interest in handicrafts.

Over the following three years, the museum, in close collaboration with designer Henriette Rolf Larssen, will organise workshops with instructors focusing on different handicraft techniques from cultural history. During the workshops, participating women will have the opportunity to try the various techniques and create handicraft works that communicate perspectives on their own lives.

“Our society calls for a rethinking of the role of Danish museums in major welfare-related issues. At the Immigration Museum, we believe that museums share a responsibility to play an active role in integration and make a difference for minorities who have contributed to our society. Through initiatives such as Lørdagssysler, the Immigration Museum aims to demonstrate how Danish museums can function as cross-cultural meeting places that bring people together around cultural history and create spaces where shared experiences can be exchanged across boundaries,” says Museum Director Cathrine Kyø Hermansen.

The purpose of the project is to break down cultural and linguistic barriers and strengthen the women’s social networks, Danish language skills and knowledge of our society and history. At the same time, the museum will collect life stories from participating women, who represent a population group whose stories are generally overlooked in the Danish museum landscape.

The project will conclude with an exhibition at the Immigration Museum in spring 2026, where the women’s testimonies and handicraft works will shed light on life as a minority woman in Denmark and invite dialogue about the importance of inclusive communities for integration into Danish society.

‘JUNCTURES OF CHANGE’ IN THE INTEGRATION OF YOUNG REFUGEES (2018-2022)

The Junctures Project is made up an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, and the Danish Research for Migration, Ethnicity and Health, University of Copenhagen.

The Junctures Project is looking to develop our understanding of migration and integration processes, by consulting refugee youth about their own experiences and exploring how changes in policy, practice, and sociopolitical context shape geographical, biological, cultural, emotional and social transitions into Danish society. More specifically, the project sets out to identify and investigate the ‘junctures of change’ – events, social relations, possibilities or circumstances that arise or dissolve at specific formative moments in time and space of direction-taking or re-orientation – that influence the life trajectories of young refugees as they transition into Danish society.

The project runs from 2018-2022 and is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark. The results of the project will be presented on a seminar at Migration Museum of Denmark on 22 February 2023.

IMPRESSIONS, TRACES, EXPRESSIONS – IT’S ABOUT FEELING SAFE (2023-2025)

With a grant of more than DKK 700,000 from the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces, the Immigration Museum and Furesø Libraries, in collaboration with the Danish Jewish Museum, began 2023 with a new interdisciplinary partnership focusing on Danish-Jewish cultural history and contemporary life. Marking 400 years of Jewish presence in Denmark, it remains highly relevant to focus on the conditions of minorities in a democracy and the significance of immigration for our society.

One year earlier, the then Danish government launched a national action plan against antisemitism, which included funding for new collaborations between museums and libraries across the country to organise exhibitions and events about Jewish life, culture and history. Together, the Immigration Museum, Furesø Libraries and the Danish Jewish Museum seized the opportunity and submitted an application for the initiative Impressions, Traces, Expressions – It’s About Feeling Safe (2023-2025).

Over the following three years, residents of Furesø Municipality and the rest of North Zealand will experience the initiative through a wide range of events focusing on Jewish literature, music, food and other forms of culture, as well as a major temporary exhibition at the Immigration Museum and Farum Kulturhus about Jewish identity and the history of antisemitism in 2025. By spreading information and knowledge about Danish-Jewish life, culture and history, we aim to help ensure that Denmark’s national safeguards against antisemitism and hate crimes are maintained and strengthened.

STORIES FROM THE 1970S – GUEST WORKERS IN DENMARK (2021-2023)

Labour migration to Denmark has taken place for centuries – with varying levels of intensity and more or less regulation. The period from 1970 to the present day can tell us a great deal about how people experience a temporary stay developing into a permanent life, with everything that this involves and brings with it. Many of those who arrived around 1970 are now retired and living in Denmark, some have passed away, others have returned to their countries of origin, and many of their descendants in Denmark face challenges relating to identity.

In 2021, the Immigration Museum launched a major new collecting project (2021-2023) together with some of the original labour migrants and their descendants. The purpose of the project is to document life stories, photographs, objects and other testimonies that can be preserved for future generations as part of our shared Danish history.

UKRAINIAN TESTIMONIES AT THE MUSEUM (2022-)

On 24 February 2022, the world changes. For the first time in decades, people flee from bombs and shells falling on European soil. In an instant, several million Ukrainians make the difficult decision to leave their homes, families and friends. A decision followed by a series of choices, dilemmas and coincidences. Where should I go? How do I get there? Where will I live? How will I support myself? Was leaving the right decision? When can I return home?

On the other side of Ukraine’s borders, the war likewise prompts millions of people to make choices. A choice to drop everything and drive to the border to help refugees reach safety. A choice to open their homes to complete strangers and offer them a safe place to stay. A choice to donate a T-shirt, an old bicycle or a used phone to those arriving with nothing.

Within a few days, the war brings several thousand Ukrainians to Denmark. Here, they are accommodated in private homes, asylum centres or other forms of housing. A new life begins – filled with choices, dilemmas and coincidences.

Read the research article ‘An Open Home’ in the journal GRANSK by Research Assistant Mathias Dolmer Rasmussen (2023).

Read the research article ‘Moving Evidence – An Argument for Cross-Border Museum Collecting‘ in the journal Nordisk Museologi by Research Assistant Mathias Dolmer Rasmussen (2024).

RELIGION – LIVING CULTURAL HERITAGE (2019-2022)

The project Religion – Living Cultural Heritage (2019-2022) aims to integrate and develop expertise on religion as part of the work of cultural history museums in Denmark today.

Religion and religious identity are topics on the agenda of public debate, and society needs contexts and spaces in which contemporary religious diversity can be placed in perspective. The project aims to increase awareness of the potential of cultural history museums to communicate the role of religion in the everyday lives of people in Denmark, both historically and in contemporary society, through the various areas of museum practice.

Read the research article ‘Between Family Albums, Turbans and Palkis – the Museum as a Space for Co-creation and Democratic Dialogue‘ by Museum Director Cathrine Kyø Hermansen and Curator Emma Barnhøj Jeppesen (2022).

Read more about the project here:
https://samtidsreligion.au.dk/religion-levende-kulturarv

See the learning portal about religion and museums here:
https://samtidsreligion.au.dk/religion-paa-museum

PUSH: PUBLIC SPACE IN SOCIAL HOUSING (2019-2022)

The Public Space in Social Housing project (2019-2022) is a European EU-funded project examining social housing in its various forms – known in Denmark as non-profit housing – as places where cultural integration and community building can take place. It does this by studying a large-scale housing development from the 1970s or 1980s in each of the four participating countries. In Denmark, Farum Midtpunkt was selected as the case study.

The project is led by the University of Copenhagen and consists of an interdisciplinary, international team of researchers in anthropology, architectural history, urban planning, landscape architecture and cultural heritage, as well as various associated partners from museums, municipalities and housing organisations, together with an exhibition architect and a communications expert.

Read more here: https://www.pushousing.eu/

CULINN – WHEN MUSEUMS MEET NEWLY ARRIVED RESIDENTS (2017-2020)

The interdisciplinary CULINN – Cultural Citizenship and Innovation project aimed to strengthen newly arrived residents’ sense of belonging and experience of citizenship in their new country.

In 2017, the CULINN project received DKK 4.8 million from Innovation Fund Denmark to spend three years experimenting with the development of museum communication specifically adapted to refugees and newly arrived residents as a target group. Innovation Fund Denmark sought innovative projects capable of promoting integration and supporting refugees on their path into the labour market and new communities.

Innovation Fund Denmark considered it evident that Danish cultural history museums contain a wealth of knowledge that can give newcomers a better historical and cultural understanding of the country and society in which they are building a new life. In other words, museums were important institutions that could also promote integration by strengthening newly arrived residents’ cultural citizenship.

In 2019, the project culminated in its final results and a concluding anthology presenting the lessons learned. A final conference was held on 3 February 2020.

Read more here: https://www.culinn.dk/

MUSEALISATION OF MIGRANTS’ CULTURAL HERITAGE (2018-2020)

This PhD project examines memory and uses of history among Kosovo Albanian refugees in Denmark, with the aim of establishing the musealisation of migrant groups’ cultural heritage through collecting. The purpose of this musealisation is to incorporate the group as a fully represented part of Danish history in the collections and archives of Danish museums, as well as to provide a foundation for the future musealisation of other migrant groups.

The project was jointly funded by the Immigration Museum and Roskilde University. It began on 1 October 2018 and was completed on 1 July 2020.

MICLUE

MiClue is a research collaboration between the Immigration Museum, the Danish Emigration Archives and Aalborg University. Among others, the project employs two PhD students, Pernille Skovgaard Kristensen and Sahra-Josephine Hjorth. The research project is a comparative study examining differences and similarities between immigration and emigration from both historical and contemporary perspectives. While Pernille Skovgaard Kristensen focuses on Danish emigration to the United States, Australia and Argentina, Sahra-Josephine Hjort studies Turkish labour migrants and family-reunified migrants who came to Denmark during the 1960s, as well as Romanian labour migrants and students who arrived in the country after 2007.

The research results are presented, among other places, through the temporary exhibition Migrant, which opens at the Immigration Museum on 16 September 2017 and subsequently in Aalborg. The exhibition will then travel to other locations around Denmark and Europe.

The research project is supported by the Obel Family Foundation.

Read more here: http://miclue.dk/