Sarah Holst Kjaer

About me

I have two main research topics: The study of Scandinavian family-folklore where I focus om how families create their own local culture, narratives and relationship-meanings through everyday life, sustaining relationships and dating. These practices and narratives are viewed in relations to larger societal norms, especially couple-romance, cultural history and heteronormativity. My other research area is within new tourism studies where I focus on how to make the global and local leisure- and tourism industry development sustainable and relevant to consumers. I have a focus on developing tourism establisments, culture heritage sites and hospitality industry for various consumer segments. Lately, I have developed a special interest in staycation and how to transform everyday life arenas to recreative, magical and extraordinary places. Concepts such as experience economy and culture-based innovation are central in my research. For many years I have worked closely with the Scandinavian tourism- and culture industry in order to develop and design relevant and meaningful establishments and experience products to various nationalities and consumer groups.

Background:

As an ethnologist and folklorist, I investigated cultural, secular rituals of the romantic, heteosexual couple relationship in late modernity in my Swedish doctorate thesis Sådan er det at elske. En kulturanalyse af parforhold (Danish language and research area) in 2009. I wrote about the cultural fantasies men and women have about relationship ideals and practises. How couples in their everyday life 'work' on their relationship through leisure rituals and recreative practices such as going on holiday, eating at restaurants on Valentine's Day, going to the cinema, engaging in evening school acitivies to improve the relationship, or, laxing at home, are my main interests. Also cultural fantasies about The One and Only, how to select a partner and not least how to repair and maintain a relationship is the focus of my reseach. You can read my thesis (in Danish) here. I speak to the press, for example Kristeligt Dagblad, Berlingske, another article from Berlingske on how we engage in famous people's affairs and what it says about romantic dreaming, or the television station TV2 about romance and about the norms for how men and women (should or should not) engage when they relate romantically. In 2021, I participated as a love-expert in a Danish reality show on Danish Broadcasting, DR3, Mit hemmelige match, season 2, 2021. In 2023 I worked as a tv-expert in the Danish version of the matching program Married at First Sight (Gift ved første blik) broadcasted by Danish National TV. As an academic, this is a very effective way to distribute applied scientific knowledge. Over a two week period, 150.000 viewers had seen the full show. Often, I get questions about whether 'traditional gender-behaviour' is still acceptable and many people feel lost on a date not knowing the cultural rules of engagement. Being in a relationship there is, in addition, always something to fix which seems to be the late modern mantra of the heteronormative relationships. 

A large part of my research is also dedicated to culture-based innovation in tourism- and (heritage) culture industries. I assist, do reports and run courses on how museums, county-, and city councils, and not least private experience businesses can place-make and develop their places through place-bound cultural expressions. How museums can play an active part in collaborating with the surrounding community when creating experience and identity in local societies is one of my main interests. This spills over into tourism and staycation studies: how does regional tourism-, experience-, and culture industry deal with the transformation of a place and how is it (sometimes not) guided by leisure behavior and various consumer desires such as meaning-making, relationships-building or the place-attachments of people? This part of my research-profile can be categorised as 'business ethnology within the culture- and tourism industries'. I do ethnographic fieldwork with a special interest in experience-, service-, and product innovation. How the actual conditions of the industry affect facilitating the visitors' cultural presuppositions and desires is also investigated and discussed. I too assist different societal groups in affecting urban and regional culture heritage transformation with a focus on community-driven place development and the power-structures in urban and regional transformation. As a result, I have written publications within the field of business ethnology, experience innovation and consumer desires in a regional and urban experience setting.