Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies
The Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) invites contributions from both humanistic and social science disciplines in a cross cultural interdisciplinary examination of the importance of environment to human societies.
About the group
We are interested both in the way people have conceived of environment and the way historical processes, economic networks or social patterns shape the actual existing environment.
Thanks to advances in science, we are becoming aware today that we face an assault on the well-being of the biosphere unprecedented in human history. Our technological power has reached the point that it can alter the very patterns of climate threatening both the multitude of plant and animal life as well as the material foundations of global civilization.
The development of an analytical framework necessary to develop solutions to this crisis is a two-fold process.
On the one hand we can and should approach the issue from the ‘outside’ that is in terms of the object of study: the environment itself. This involves the study of questions such as (1) the impact of technological innovation on the (natural) environment especially with a view to developing ‘green’ technologies; (2) the environmental impact of the spatial dimensioning of human populations especially in cities and suburbs as reflected in the quantity and use of natural resource inputs and in the production of wastes; (3) the impact and consequences of the economic decline of rural regions both inside the industrialized countries and globally.
At the same time, we believe that developing good responses to the issues noted above requires an understanding of how nature as well as environment is conceived and understood. Hence, we will shall consider (4) issues of mimesis, how “nature” is represented through language and image; (5) the ethical and political dimensions of representing or “writing nature”; (6) cultural patterns concerning man's relationship to the environment that have served to block, or to promote, new and alternative environmental discourses.
These discussions have both historical and culture-specific contexts which are crucial to their formulation. Texts are drawn from nature writing, poetry and fiction, landscape art and architecture, popular cultural images, narratives of landscape technologies, and cartography—among others.
Projects
Cooperation
Arctic discourses project at the University of Tromsø
The European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment