Alfred Thomas Bordado Sköld

My Ph.D.-project is part if the research center The Culture of Grief and is being supervised by Svend Brinkmann and Anders Petersen. 

The study rests on the overall assumptions that our self is relational down to its very core and that finitude functions as an irreducible horizon for our lives. From an existential-phenomenological perspective, grief can be seen as a point of intersection between these relational and existential aspects of life. We grievebecause we losethe ones we love. Losing a life partner encompasses a ‘limit situation’ where the life hitherto lived is short-circuited. Grief confronts us with some of life’s most fundamental questions, and this study investigates how the existential aspects of a shared life can be scrutinized through the perspective of the bereaved.

The project is designed as a longitudinal qualitative interview-study. Recently bereaved partners in three different generations (four in their 30s, six in their 50s and five in their 70s) are interviewed in their homes at three occasions with half-year intervals. The in-depth interviews aim to provide vivid testimonies to the existential realities and changes in the lifeworldsof the participants. Even thought the project has a generic focus, notable differences between the groups will be pinpointed in the final analysis.

In contrast to the bulk of grief research that focuses on narrative aspects, meaning construction, questions of identity and post-traumatic growth, this study attempts to illuminate the irresolvable aspects of grief; the aporias internal to a relational and finite life and how this is experienced in contemporary late modern western culture.

Bachelor: I teach introductory courses in Problem Based Learning (PBL) on first semester and advanced Social Psychology and Personality Psychology on second semester.

Master: I'm cordinating the elective courses: Culture og Grief and The Psychology of Love on 9th semester.