Sofie Henze-Pedersen

Areas of work

Sofie Henze-Pedersen’s primary field of research is children and family life in the welfare state, with a particular focus on how children and adults live with and navigate vulnerable positions and situations in everyday and family life, where challenges rarely affect only the individual but the entire family in different ways. She is concerned with the interaction between lived life and the understandings of and approaches to social problems, and how these shape everyday understandings, societal expectations as well as institutional practices and responses.

A central area of her research is how families can be challenged and change over time in connection with social problems, including family violence, intimate partner violence, and parental imprisonment. Here, she examines how everyday and family life are experienced by both children and adults, and how these experiences are closely connected to social and political understandings of what constitutes a “good” childhood and a “good” family life.

In recent years, she has focused particularly on violence in intimate relationships, including both children who live with violence in the family and adults who experience intimate partner violence. She works with violence as a temporal phenomenon, which provides new insights into how violence affects everyday life and relationships over time.

Another central area of research is children’s and families’ encounters with the welfare system, including administrative case processing and children’s involvement in social work. She examines how children are involved and understood in case processes, as well as how both children and parents are met by professional assessments and normative ideas about childhood, parenthood, and family in a welfare state context.

Across her work, she is concerned with the dual role of the welfare state: as a system of support and assistance for children and families in vulnerable positions, but at the same time as a system that helps define and shape understandings of social problems, childhood, and family life. This perspective is central to both her empirical and theoretical research.

Methods

Sofie Henze-Pedersen has strong methodological competencies in qualitative research, with a particular focus on examining the perspectives and lived experiences of children and adults. She works especially with interviews, visual methods, and ethnographic methods, which make it possible to gain insight into children’s and adults’ everyday lives and relationships in the context of complex social problems.

Background

Sofie Henze-Pedersen holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen (2013) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen (2021).