20. January 2025

A Historical Outlook

"From the very beginning, we have focused on being outward-looking and showing people how historical research sheds light on contemporary issues," began Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun in this conversation, the second in a series of talks with DNRF center leaders about how the humanities and social sciences can create value for and have an impact on the world outside the research center.

Birkedal Bruun is the director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Privacy Studies, PRIVACY, which investigates the concept of privacy from a historical perspective. The center opened in 2017, and from the outset, it has gained attention with several groundbreaking and innovative projects that extend beyond its historical research.

While Birkedal Bruun believes it is important to maintain fundamental scientific quality, she also emphasizes that basic research can certainly engage in practical exchanges with researchers and practitioners and can have value for a broader audience.

“The common thread is research on boundaries and zones between individuals and communities, and the knowledge of what you could call ‘research translation’ from one field to another, which we harvest in our daily interdisciplinary research collaboration at PRIVACY,” she explained. She continued:

“Whether we have been successful or fortunate with its relevance, the timing of the center’s focus on privacy has been perfect. We have succeeded in reaching out and creating value in many different contexts,” Birkedal Bruun explained, drawing on her wide-ranging expertise and collaborating with lawyers, architects, and nurses.

“People come to me and say, ‘Wow! It never occurred to me that privacy has historical roots,’ when I present PRIVACY’s research, and they tell me how it has given them entirely new perspectives on their own work.”

It’s in the Walls

“When we talk about privacy it’s about the boundaries we draw between the individual and the community,” explained Birkedal Bruun.

“It’s important to understand how people function in society. How they coexist under varying conditions. Our focus on privacy helps us study and understand how people interact with each other in specific contexts. Privacy research uncovers relationships that involve respect, protection, neighbor relations, and the dynamics between surveillance and privacy. We often hear that privacy is a new thing. But the English word ‘privacy’ dates back to the late Middle Ages, with roots going back to the Latin ‘privatus.’ Ideas about what is private have evolved over a long time, especially within a Western worldview.”


“We may not think about this historical baggage, because our ideas about the relationship between the individual and the community are so ingrained that they almost seem embedded in the walls. But historical research reminds us that these ideas grow out of context-fixed ideas of what society and the individual are. Historical research reminds us that privacy is defined, enforced, and violated by concrete individuals in specific contexts.”

“Today, when we send data around the world and work with global technologies and legislation, it’s important to keep this human aspect in mind. When decisions are made about funding, production, distribution, and use of technology, people are involved. And where there are people, there are preconceptions. For example, data processors may have very different approaches to what confidential handling of health data means, depending on their cultural background and context.”

Input for Lawyers and Tech People

In 2020, Birkedal Bruun was contacted by the director of the worldwide organization International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), who wanted to arrange a visit to PRIVACY. IAPP teaches about and certifies data protection legislation, and at first, Birkedal Bruun thought it was a misunderstanding:

“We are historians, do you know that? I wrote to the director. He replied that he was indeed aware of that but still wanted to meet. That meeting led to a podcast with him about my own research in church history and historical privacy studies in general. Later, I was invited to IAPP’s major European congress in Brussels, where I gave the opening lecture on the history of privacy to 2,400 people—tech professionals, policy experts, and lawyers—and I also spoke to officials from the British government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport.”

Coronavirus Breaks Boundaries

For Birkedal Bruun the meeting with IAPP was a great starting point to show how the historical angle in her basic research center is also relevant in addressing current privacy issues. When the pandemic sent people home in 2020, Birkedal Bruun saw a perfect opportunity to integrate PRIVACY’s historical and interdisciplinary work into a contemporary project.

“The Corona crisis, in a way, was very exciting from a research perspective because the lockdown led to a total breakdown of boundaries between the private and the public, the private and the professional,” she said. She went on to explain how it was an ideal opportunity to bring together several fields of expertise within a PRIVACY context.

This led to the research project Stay Home: The Home during the Coronavirus Crisis—and Beyond (https://stayhomestudier.dk). Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, the project unites researchers from architecture, family history, technology studies, and theology, and works with input for the home of the future. The project provides researchers with insights into the physical, digital, social, and cultural boundaries and zones of the home, but the interdisciplinary collaboration is also an eye-opening addition to the cross-disciplinary work at PRIVACY:

“At PRIVACY, we have researchers from different historical disciplines (architecture, church, law, cultural, and social history), who—although all working historically—have very different approaches and traditions. But, in Stay Home, the methodological distance between the research fields is even greater. The most important insight is probably the fruitful, but often invisible, mutual influence that happens when four researchers from such diverse disciplines work together,” said Birkedal Bruun.

“The architect, for example, frequently hears the family historian talk about her research on domestic violence. This means that when he continues with his architectural work, he has domestic violence somehow lodged in his mental professional toolkit. Just as he thinks about light, sound, and materials, he also considers that the home is the setting for social dynamics, and this will likely influence his architecture.”

When the Hospital Moves into the Living Room

Based on her work with Stay Home, Birkedal Bruun was contacted by two researchers from Social Pharmacy, who were investigating issues concerning de-hospitalization and home-based hospital treatments . In short, it’s about what happens to the home when it also has to function as a hospital.

PRIVACY was once again part of a project bringing together various professional groups, and the interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach clearly shows that de-hospitalization is a complex matter, where public and private boundaries are crossed in entirely new ways, affecting patients, healthcare staff, and relatives.

“Nurses have deep knowledge from their daily work with patients, but researchers can more generally and historically highlight some of the boundaries and zones between the private and public, which are drawn in new ways when the home also functions as a hospital. These two forms of knowledge raise questions, for example, about the disposal of used packaging, responsibilities, and safety for patients, relatives, and staff, or the balance between practical functionality and personal taste in the design of beds for home hospital care.”

Reaching Out and Creating Impact

PRIVACY’s ambition to reach out and continuously work to bring their historical research into dialogue with contemporary issues has clearly been a successful strategy, where one project leads to another, and where the center’s researchers are constantly coming into contact with new collaborators and professional groups that can use the center’s knowledge and its unique interdisciplinary approach in one form or another.

For example, the center has also been involved in producing the app Hidden Copenhagen, in collaboration with researchers from the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen, the Copenhagen City Museum, and the City Archives. The app provides guidance and information on a historical walk through Copenhagen, accompanied by a fictional medical student from the 17th century. Additionally, there is a collaboration with the University of Copenhagen’s School of Global Health, where Associate Professor Natacha Klein Käfer from PRIVACY contributes to research on historical medicine (Natacha Klein Käfer: Health and Privacy from a Historical Perspective – University of Copenhagen).

“Thus, the knowledge we gain from our historical research circulates across various contexts. And because we have time and resources in a basic research center, I can go to Brussels, give my lecture, and then engage in dialogue with the audience, refine my arguments, and bring the questions and challenges of the audience into our research. This fosters a two-way exchange between contemporary issues and our historical research, which is a significant advantage.”

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