Naja Dyrendom Graugaard is Associate Professor, Center for Gender, Sexuality & Difference at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Copenhagen University. She is a Danish-Kalaaleq Inuk researcher with an expertise in past and present colonial relations between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland).
Concerned with the dominance of colonial knowledge regimes and Danish exceptionalism in contemporary cultural manifestations of Scandinavian colonialism, her research attends to decolonial, intersectional, and Indigenous narratives, Kalaallit lived experiences, and Inuit knowledge systems.
She often draws on auto-reflexive, arts-based, and collaborative approaches to research to unsettle and decolonize research. She has published poetic, theatrical, and auto-biographical writings that shed light on the (inter)generational experiences of colonization, racialization, and resurgence in mixed, Indigenous families in Denmark. She also engages in different forms of public dissemination on Nordic colonial histories – most recently as a co-writer and dramaturge of the play “Inuk Ingerlaartoq” (The Wandering Human), as well as her engagement in the Kalaaleq documentary film “Orsugiak – the White Gold of Greenland”.
She currently examines the relations between land, body, and healing in the Arctic and Kalaallit communities, as part of her work-package lead in the cross- Arctic EU Horizon project ‘Birgejupmi – Bridging knowledge systems for inclusive, resilient and prosperous Arctic coastal futures‘’.
Her most recent publications are “Colonial Reproductive Coercion and Control in Kalaallit Nunaat: Racism in Denmark’s IUD program” (2025) (https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2024.2427817) and “Fun for real! Dismantling the “cool colonizer” through the decolonial politics of memes from Kalaallit Nunaat” (2025) (https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801251377804)
Naja is also Affiliate Scholar 2025-2026 at RIFS, Research Institute for Sustainability, GFZ, Potsdam. She is an editorial board member of the Women, Gender & Research journal, and chief editor of the journal’s special issue on “Decolonization”, published in December 2025.
