Lunchtime Discussions

How come Western countries consume more meat than ever despite of its negative impacts? Agronomist, ethnologist and cultural historian, Dr Karen Lykke Syse, talks about how meat consumption in Norway is being justified by history and culture.

AD 536 and 540 are important years in European history, and marks the advent of a series of documented environmental changes that affected societies throughout Europe in various ways. Sudden and severe climate deterioration led to vast crop failure and was followed by plague in the following decades and centuries (up to ca. AD 750?). How did this affect Scandinavian societies? Frode Iversen, professor at the Department of Archaeology at Museum of Cultural History, UiO, is here to tell us!

Sustainable food is on the agenda of the UN, nations, corporations and an increasing number of consumers. Yet, does sustainability include animal welfare? This week, Live Kleveland, lawyer and co-founder of the Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance will ask how modern food production can become more animal friendly.

How and when does a being become autonomous? What makes an environment? In this talk, Sara R. Yazdani discusses her work on how notions of the environmental have been explored in contemporary and late 20th century art: art in which new alliances and new types of environmental and affective formation have been mobilized against an anthropocentric world-view.

This week, the curator, producer and artist James Finucane introduces the long and honourable tradition of subvertising ('subverting advertising'). We will learn about the background behind this 'protest art' movement, it's various forms and functions, and, perhaps most importantly, the tools and know-how to do it yourself.

How does the environment and lifestyle impact our genes, both today and in the future? This week, professor in Public Health Gunnar Tellnes will introduce the concepts of "Green Care" and "Nature-Culture-Health" (NaCuHeal). Drawing on recent epigenetic research that indicates that our genes may be 'turned on and off' as consequence of the way we live, he will present his work and vision at NaKuHel Center in Asker, Norway. 

What does it mean to listen to the ending of a world that has always already ended? How can we attend to what has been there but heard elsewhere, by someone else, that may not be ours to hear?  This week, geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser will introduce Climates of Listening, an ongoing conversation and collaboration with predominantly women, queer and transgender people in the Pacific.

What can future fictions tell us about how we live and exist in the present? What can they tell us about how we may live and exist in the present?

An introduction to the system for waste management, including a local example of resources in a closed loop; your food waste.

In 1965 Johan Galtung upset Norway´s architectural scene by envisioning a future society residing in a network of cybernetic cities governed by genetically modified elites. In those cities, the citizens would enjoy a life-long education in virtual spaces, shape their lives according to their personal wishes and move around on flying carpets.

Do videogames help us engage with climate change and the nonhuman timescale of the Anthropocene? Or do they reflect exactly the kind of expansionist, techno-utopian logic that got us into this crisis in the first place? Most likely, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

How has human interference affected plant diversity in the past? Karoline Kjesrud, Associate Professor at the Museum of Cultural History, presents an overview of the ongoing interdisciplinary project "Nordic People and Plants" and results that are estimated to influence plant practices in Scandinavian societies.

What role does energy play in fighting climate change and achieving more sustainable societies? Vebjørn Bakken, theoretical chemist and director of UiO:Energy, presents the work of UiO:Energy, its interdisciplinary approach, and why there is a need for such an initiative.

How might diverse ways of knowing, including indigenous knowledges, the humanities and the arts, be more influential in the environmental decision-making that shapes our world? Ecologist, philosopher and political scientist Fern Wickson talks on the value and challenges of inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to research.

Something violent is occurring beneath their feet. A fracking site is constructed. The subsurface is being fractured. Artist and filmmaker Rebecca Birch presents narrated excerpts from her forthcoming creative documentary, Undermine.

Has the Chernobyl catastrophe contributed to the fall of communism? Political Science researcher Kacper Szulecki talks on positioning the environmental anti-nuclear protests, which spilled across Poland between 1985 and 1990, in a broader context.

How can architecture form new human-nonhuman relations, cohabitation, ecosystem thinking and doing? Anthropologists Tinna Grétarsdóttir and Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson talk on the socio-material entanglements and multispecies relations of the Icelandic turf house.

How can material approaches contribute new insights on the history and present of infectious diseases in a climate perspective? Senior curator and historian Ageliki Lefkaditou will explore the case of malaria with the help of a series of museum objects being prepared for display in an exhibition on climate change.

What insights can artistic approaches provide on agricultural issues? Artists Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen talks on connecting farming, life and growth to contemporary art, with Øvre Ringstad Farm in eastern Norway as an example. 

How to understand China's global investments abroad in an environmental context, and the planetary, world-making nature of global building projects? Alessandro Rippa and Roger Norum talk about what the environmental humanities can bring to this field.

How to better understand predicaments of environmental uncertainty? Felix Riede, Professor of Climate Change Archaeology and Environmental Humanities and OSEH Professor II, presents the 'palaeoenvironmental humanities' and its prospects to open up new interpretive and comparative terrain for the examination of human-climate relations.

How does a pandemic reveal inherent socioeconomic and ecological inequalities in an already vulnerable and polarised society? Anwesha Dutta, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, presents notions on the social and political effects of COVID-19 and the lockdown in India.

How to get beyond a neoclassical theory of economic growth? Economist Marie Storli, leader of Rethinking Economics Norway will speak about ways of rethinking and democratizing standard economic theories on which climate-economy models are based.