2021
The Sound of (Skin) Colors in Norwegian Friluftsliv. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Drawing on two years of fieldwork with minority youth who participated in an outdoor education program located in a low-income area of Oslo, anthropologist Tuva Beyer Broch focus how youth balance their own family background, peers, authority figures, Norwegian society and natural surroundings.
Time and place: Dec. 8, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on zoom.
Drawing on two years of fieldwork with minority youth who participated in an outdoor education program located in a low-income area of Oslo, Broch focus how youth balance natural surroundings. This presentation introduces Norwegian Friluftsliv (life outdoors) as a national identity marker, and then offers empirical vignettes of youth experiences with friluftsliv, the landscapes they move through and people they pass along their way. The vignettes illuminate how the youth talk and see colors in their surroundings, as well as how they place themselves within this colorful landscape.
This paper asks: whose framework are the youth acting and understanding themselves within? Broch explore how youth express and experience “the colors of nature,” and what different seasons, landscapes and activities mean for them in the intersection between family background, peers, activity leaders, and Norwegian society. While skies and mountains are seen as white by the youth, Bislet stadium and city parks seem to have colors. Standing between cultures, minority youth attempt to meet different demands, and in the process, may end up betraying themselves.
About the presenter
Tuva Beyer Broch (tuva.broch@nina.no) researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Nature Research, Lillehammer. She is a psychological orientated anthropologist, currently also attached to the department of social anthropology ( University of Oslo) on the project Private Lives; Embedding Sociality at Digital ‘Kitchen-Tables’ where she focus on digital and emotional identity work among urban and rural young adults: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/private-lives/case-study-1-emotional-and-digital-identity-work/
How Norway Made the World Whiter. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In this talk, artist Marte Johnslien and art historian Ingrid Halland will introduce their new research project The Materiality of White that explores how the Norwegian innovation Titanium Dioxide has changed surfaces in art, architecture and design—making the world whiter, brighter and cleaner looking.
Time and place: Dec. 1, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on zoom.
The chemical compound titanium dioxide (TiO2) circulates extensively through our material, biological, and economic systems, most of the time completely unnoticeable: in the food we eat, the paper we print on, the paint on the wall, and our iPhone chargers. The substance was originally discovered and patented as a white pigment by Norwegian chemists Peder Farup and Gustav Jebsen, and production for the global market began in the mine Titania AS in Sokndal, Norway, and in the factory Kronos Titan AS in Fredrikstad, Norway, in 1916. Revolutionizing the colour industry, the TiO2 patent brought into the market a pure white paint that resisted miscolouring due to dirt and rust; TiO2 has been called “the whitest white” and its material properties are inextricably related to invisibility, durability, and homogenization.
Throughout the 20th Century, the material was increasingly used in combination with other colours (as coating for concrete, glazing for ceramics, and additive in plastic) thereby changing the aesthetics of surfaces in art, architecture, and design—its extreme covering ability made surfaces smoother, brighter, and more opaque. After a hundred years of mining, the extraction of TiO2 has left an irreversible change in the local landscape: The environmental trace of mining modernism consists of a vast cut through the surface of the earth and a grey artificial desert of mining waste. Do we need our world to be more white?
In this talk, Marte Johnslien and Ingrid Halland will 1) introduce their new research project by giving a brief introduction to the history of TiO2, and 2) share experiences about their research collaboration (artistic research and research in the humanities).
About the presenters
Marte Johnslien is a visual artist and Associate Professor at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She works with sculpture, installation art and artist’s books, and she defended her PhD thesis in 2020. Johnslien’s work is included in the collections of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and Lillehammer Art Museum.
Ingrid Halland is an architectural historian and art critic. She is Associate Professor at The University of Bergen and Associate Professor II at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design where she teaches at the PhD Programme. The book Ung Uro: Unsettling Climates in Nordic Art, Architecture & Design (Cappelen Damm Akademisk) was published in Spring 2021.
Sustainability Narratives: Seeing Environmental Transformation in Medieval Nordic Literature. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In this talk, Old Norse philologist Stefka G. Eriksen will introduce the new research initiative 'Sustainability Narratives' (SUSTAIN) which discusses the role of literature and narratives of all mediums in environmental and societal transformations in the medieval North.
Time and place: Nov. 24, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - physically at Stort møterom, GS, Blindern; digitally on Zoom.
The current climate and environmental crisis has made us aware of the pressing need for powerful, large-scale narratives to activate new ways of thinking about and relating to our environment. The only problem we have is that such narratives take time to develop, to be communicated globally, and to be internalized - so how do we know what would work and what wouldn't. As one possible solution, SUSTAIN proposes to look at the narratives left by a culture that was shaken up and persevered a similar environmental crisis in the Middle Ages (transition to the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, etc.). Medieval literary culture presents us with a rich reservoir of largely unstudied environmental narratives that reveal how people dealt with, made sense, fixed, and survived these predicaments. The main objective of SUSTAIN is to develop new models for conceptualizing societal and environmental sustainability today, that may change the way we think about our environmental crisis today.
This will be done by looking at literary and material culture produced in the medieval North, a context where the impact of the crisis was particularly grave. Further, the project will focus on medieval urban centers, which were some of the first social institutions that left distinct environmental footprints. By combining a myriad of sources (archaeological evidence, historical sources, place names, literature and art), we will study the link between the environmental and historical development of medieval urban centers and the stories told about them in literature and art. Ultimately, by exploring the way narratives were used as tools for tackling societal and environmental challenges in the medieval North, the project contextualizes our current predicaments within their historical context. This will give us new insights into our place in the environment, and thus help us make adaptive solutions more salient today.
About the presenter
Stefka G. Eriksen is a literary- and cultural historian, working with Old Norse literary and manuscript culture. She is a Senior Researcher at The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, Oslo. She has published on numerous cultural, social, cognitive, and environmental aspects of Old Norse literary culture. Her latest publications include: 'Readings in Times of Crises: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland,' Scandinavian Studies (in press); 'St. Clements church, Niðaróss: A Castle of the Mind in Old Norse Literature and Culture,' Journal of Environmental Archaeology 2021.
The Power of Ice: Norwegian Cold in 19th Century Colonial Algeria. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Towards the end of the 19th century, there was a modest but regular export of block ice from Norwegian lakes to Algeria. In this Environmental Lunchtime Discussion, historian Solfrid Klakegg Surland will explain how studying the marketing and consumption of Nordic ice in a hot colonial market can teach us something about the relationship between humans and things.
Time and place: Nov. 17, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - physically at Stort møterom, GS, Blindern; digitally on Zoom.
In the French colonial project in Algeria, Norwegian natural ice worked as an agent, exercising a power of its own that we may call “ice power”. As the colonisers increasingly domesticated ice by making it a normal household item, ice domesticated the colonisers back into dependency.
Ice helped the colonisers obtain a comfortable and reassuringly familiar life that was not too different from the life they knew from their homeland, in contrast to the unbearable heat and dust of the colony.
At the same time, ice was playing a role as a cultural marker of Frenchness and modernity, highlighting the asymmetric binary of the “modern” French and the “backward” indigenous culture. This Orientalist perspective manifested itself in the social practices of French-style and Muslim cafés, where differences between colonisers and colonised were put into relief. In the French colonial narrative, Muslim cafés were characterized by idleness and standstill, contrasted by French cafés which showcased modernity and elegance. To the French, cafés were places where their perceived moral, estethical and intellectual superiority was evidenced. Ice creams and cold drinks at the café table told a subtle tale of modernity and superiority.
Another way that Norwegian ice exercised its thing power, was in its ability to invoke dreams of a sublime Nordic land of crystal brilliance and freshness. Marketing Norwegian ice was to sell a southern idea of “Norwegianness”, a northern land of cool purity compressed into a block of ice.
About the presenter
Originally an engineer in the oil industry, Solfrid Klakegg Surland spent some years sailing while taking up writing on freelance basis. Her up until then slumbering interest in history woke up when she sailed with her family around Great Britain, reading the history of the Vikings, Scots, and English together with her young daughter. She completed her MA in history this spring, as part of Norwegian Maritime Museum’s research project The Last Ice Age, on Norway's export of natural ice in the 19th and early 20th century.
Currently, she is contributing to a book on emotional history edited by two historians at the University of Oslo. Also, she will be contributing to an anthology from The Last Ice Age research project, and is also working on articles for historical journals about the Norwegian-Algerian ice trade.
The New Fish: Reflections on the Global History of Farmed Salmon. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In this talk, reporters Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli discuss the profitability and severe ecological impacts of salmon fishing in history, and the dangers of speaking out against the industry.
Time and place: Nov. 10, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - physically at Stort møterom, GS, Blindern; digitally on Zoom.
In 2017 and 2018, the investigative reporters Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli wrote a series of articles about salmon farming and suppression of science. Published in Morgenbladet and Harvest, the series won prizes for groundbreaking reporting on science, and was highly criticized by the salmon industry. After two more years of research, they will now present a book about the history of farmed salmon, under the title The New Fish: A Global History of Farmed Salmon. After a promising start in the 1970, the industry is today both highly profitable, and deeply troubled due to problems with diseases, salmon lice and fish welfare. The authors will give insight into their work, and explain why they see this as a history of unintended consequences.
About the presenters
Simen Sætre is a Norwegian journalist in Morgenbladet. He has previously published four books, such as Hugo. A biography (2006) and Fjordman. A portrait of an anti-islamist (2013).
Kjetil S. Østli is a journalist in Aftenposten with backgrounds in the university paper Universitas, Morgenbladet and Forsvarets forum.
Oslo Science City – Where the Future is Made! Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Oslo Science City aims to position Oslo and Norge on the global stage as a leading science nation. Here we have 7 500 researchers and 30 000 students contributing to finding sustainable solutions to large-scale societal issues.
Time and place: Nov. 3, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - physically at Stort møterom, GS, Blindern; digitally on Zoom.
Oslo is one of Northern Europe's leading university town. Oslo Science City shall endeavour to contribute to tighter cooperation and exchange between education, research, business and the public sector, and thereby strengthen Oslo's position as a science capital. The significant science communities in the area form the basis of this ambition mobilisation of knowledge.
Oslo Science City spans the area from Majorstuen and Marienlyst to Blindern, Gaustad and Ullevål, also including Campus Radiumhospitalet. This area has the densest distribution of 'knowledge-based' organisations and enterprises in Norway, with 300 start-ups, 7 500 researchers and 30 000 students. Together with the multitude of motivated students in the area, outstanding researchers and strong start-up communities represent a national resource that may drive Norway's first innovation district to find sustainable solutions to large-scale societal issues.
Cities all over the world are developing robust ecosystems in connection with their academic institutions in order to attract capable personell and stimulate innovation. Oslo Science City will be drawing on experiences from the global top, but the development of Norway's first innovation district aims to also build up its own strength and adjust to our culture and society. Together, we will develop Oslo Science City into the world's greenest innovation district.
About the presenter
Christine Wergeland Sørbye leads the work on the development of the innovation district Oslo Science City. Sørbye has a background from the Oslo municipal department, where she has lead a series of development projects with both private sector and public sector participation. She has among other projects worked on the development of Campus Oslo - a strategy for the development of Oslo as a knowledge capital (in Norwegian). Sørbye is a Cand. Ed. from profession studies in pedagogy at the University of Oslo with a focus on management, organisation and learning.
Oslo Science City website: https://oslosciencecity.no
Ecology of Grief: Reading Pain, Memory and Anthropocene in the Himalayas. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
This talk by Dr. Rahul Ranjan, political anthropologist at the Oslo Metropolitan University, presents a case study of 'climatic event' in Uttarakhand, India, to demonstrate how aggressive development projects such as dams are increasing the frequency of disaster.
Time and place: Oct. 27, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - physically at Stort møterom, GS, Blindern; digitally on Zoom.
While increasing focus on the study of climate change in this region, especially Uttarakhand, has brought considerable attention in the popular media and emphasises the role of climate change, there remains considerable focus only on solution-driven approaches and development-based projects. However, these valuable approaches render the emotive and affective reading of climatic events as an appendix to the explanation. The paper delineates a new perspective on the idea of “environmental grief” to approach two inter-related interests. First, it situates the emergent category of Anthropocene, which is featured through climate change to understand the climatic event in the Himalayas. Second, it explores the possibilities of legal endeavours such as rights of rivers and glaciers as a way of thinking about climate change. The case study situates the environmental grief within the broader discussion of law, non-human and the Anthropocene.
About the presenter
Doctor Rahul Ranjan is a political Anthropologist and holds a postdoc position based at the International Studies department, OsloMet. His postdoc project looks at the Rights of Rivers, within which he has a proposal on the religious and political ecology of the Ganges in India. He is interested in political ecology, memory studies, postcolonialism and environmental humanities. He is finishing his first manuscript on the memory politics of anticolonial struggles amongst Adivasi (Indigenous peoples) in India.
WEBINAR: Literary Studies and Nature Conservation in Africa: The Case of the Congo Basin. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In his talk, poet, writer and language teacher Kenneth Nsah will discuss the role of literature in climate mitigation, environmental protection, and nature conservation in the Congo Basin. He will address how literature can promote and challenge environmental policies and practices.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on zoom.
In his talk, Nsah will discuss the potential role of literary texts to draw attention to environmental issues while also formulating critiques of nature conservation. In other words, he will argue for the role of literature—construed as both literary texts and their ecocritical analysis—can shed light climate and ecological issues by raising environmental awareness, imaging possible sustainable futures, foregrounding local and indigenous epistemologies, and interrogating some ideologies and practices within nature conservation that are harmful to both nature and humans. The core of his talk will be an ecocritical engagement with some selected literary texts from the Congo Basin.
About the presenter
Kenneth Nsah (pen name: Nsah Mala), is a poet, children's author, writer, translator, and language teacher (English and French), currently doing his PhD in comparative literature at Aarhus University in Denmark. His research interests include literature and migration, diaspora literature, ecocriticism, comparative literature, African literatures, and creative writing.
Do Antarctica’s animals need to be decolonized? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Antarctica is a famously a continent with no people – or at least, no people who call the continent home – and people are usually regarded as central to any definition of colonialism. In this talk, Peder Roberts, associate professor at the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Stavanger, asks whether the way humans engage with the living environment of Antarctica nevertheless can be analyzed in terms of colonialism.
Time and place: –, Register for webinar on Zoom
The idea that the continent without people should also be a scene of colonialism seems counter-intuitive. There were no Indigenous Antarctic peoples to subjugate, convert, or attempt to mould into European archetypes. Some scholars have nevertheless argued that colonialism is a useful framework because the way humans have engaged with Antarctic environments bears the hallmarks of the colonial mindsets that Europeans employed in so many other parts of the world. Antarctic animals were classified, regulated, and harvested. The intertwined logics of capitalism and colonialism supported a view of Antarctica as a space to be conquered and exploited, the inscription of European names on maps matched by the incorporation of Antarctic animals into systems of scientific knowledge and global markets. That kind of thinking also centred an anthropocentric view of humans as rulers and animals as resources. Efforts to decolonize science and environmental management have challenged this last position, and there are good reasons to support applying that view to Antarctica. But if we describe human treatment of Antarctic animals as a form of colonialism, does it stretch the term to breaking point? The penguins can be liberated in the sense of humans deciding not to interfere with them. Describing that process as decolonization seems to miss an important point about agency and subjecthood – and misses the fact that the mistreatment of animals under colonial regimes has invariably been as much about controlling people through animals as it has been about controlling the animals themselves.
About the speaker
Peder Roberts works at the University of Stavanger and at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He is interested in the historical relationships between science, politics, and ideas of environmental management in the polar regions and how these shape the present. He is leader of the ERC-funded project Greening the Poles: Science, the Environment, and the Creation of the Modern Arctic and Antarctic.
Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In this talk, environmental anthropologist Sara Asu Schroer will introduce us to her ongoing ethnographic research project that investigates the challenges and possibilities of European vulture conservation within landscapes that have become at once increasingly toxic and sanitized.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
In this talk Sara Asu Schroer will introduce us to her ongoing research project Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction (LiVE) based at the Institute of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) and the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). The project investigates the situated practices of avian conservation in changing European landscapes. It traces the environmental history of vulture reintroductions in European mountain ranges, as well as contemporary challenges and possibilities of scavenger survival within landscapes that have become at once increasingly toxic and sanitized. Focussing attention on the vital processes of decay, the project will investigate how ideas, values, and imaginaries associated with the medicalisation and sanitization of death and decay in late modernity influence the ways in which conservation initiatives conceptualise and manage lively processes of dying and decaying in anthropogenic landscapes. It will do so by analysing conservation not only as an ethical and political endeavour, but also importantly as an aesthetic one, through which human-wildlife relations are ordered, sensed, and imagined.
About the presenter
Sara Asu Schroer is an environmental anthropologist with a longstanding interest in more-than-human ethnography, the anthropology of learning and enskilment as well as interdisciplinary debates on communication, meaning making and affectivity. She has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship for the project Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction: An Ethnographic Study of Avian Conservation in Changing European Landscapes (LiVE), based at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, UiO (2020-2023). She is co-editor of Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically (Routledge, 2018), and co-speaker of the recently establish OSEH collaboratory Worlds of Meaning in Conservation.
Grain, Heat and Liquid: A Short History of Porridge in Norway. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Troels Troels-Lunden (1840-1921) wrote porridge and gruel were the oldest known warm dishes in Scandinavia. Both before and since, porridge has remained key in the lives of many Scandinavians up until very recently. In this talk, Tarjei Brekke, master student at the program Chinese Culture and Society, offers some reflections on this ancient food and his experiences with finding some of its first ingredients in the contemporary world.
Time and place: –, Hybrid: Stort Møterom, GS, HumSam Library and WEBINAR
Porridge and gruel have been referenced in Norwegian poetry and documents for ages, but it's not unlikely that its traditions have followed humanity for as long as humanity has eaten grain. In 77AD, Pliny the Elder in his thesis on natural history remarked that the Germanic peoples sow oats and eat only porridge. An Icelandic saga recounting a scene of last viking king Harald Hardrada and Sneglu-Halle, an Icelandic skald who was fond of porridge, portrays the king forcing the poet to eat porridge until he bursts. The skald then responds: "No, my lord, I will not! You may kill me if you wish, but porridge shall not become my bane."
Over the last few years, however, porridge has lost ground in Norway, declining in popularity since the 1960s. (Bugge, 2019). Rice porridge is here a very lonely exception and was in 2018 still one of the seven most commonly eaten everyday dishes in Norway. However, as one may expect, rice porridge is carried by holiday tradition and the tendency to be packaged in easy-to-prep sets, and even a dish as influential as that is still outmatched by fish and meat, particularly sausages and patties.
So a question stands: Can porridge be brought back as a vegetarian alternative to a meat dinner or a club sandwich, and more importantly: Do we really have the time for it?
About the presenter
Tarjei Brekke is a master student at the master program Chinese Culture and Society at the University of Oslo. His master thesis seeks to study how Chinese national marine environmental governance in relation to the fishing industry affects fishing policy and distant-water fishing in international waters. He is also a candidate at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities Honours program and works as a student assistant for the school. He has previously held the position as leader of the China Studies Student Association and has recently started a student association for tea called Cha-Yi.
What’s Method to the Environmental Humanities? Strategies and Tactics for Low-Carbon Inquiry and Exchange. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
This talk by assistant professor Anne Pasek at Trent University asks what might happen if the environmental humanities were to extend its intellectual project to the domain of research methods. What would more ecologically-just modes of inquiry and exchange look like, and how might they work to reconfigure the global academy for the better?
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
What do questions of method mean for our fields of study, and for the climate? Insights from critical mobility studies, the energy humanities, and science and technology studies suggest that fossil energy systems structure the ways we produce and exchange ideas, favouring certain kinds of research and researchers at the cost of others. From extensive air travel to rapidly increasing data needs, it’s also the case that the carbon footprint of the research sector is growing rapidly, at rates that cannot be indefinitely sustained. For reasons of climate action, epistemological justice, or just in anticipation of a wider energy transition, it therefore seems prudent to imagine and organize towards future modes of academic work that do not take cheap flights and servers for granted. Drawing on findings from the Low-Carbon Methods Group, Anne Pasek will outline several prospects and barriers for an academy with a radically reformed orientation towards carbon, focusing specifically on how methodology might present unique political inroads to problems of epistemological inequities and climate justice.
About the speaker
Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of climate communication, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. Her research focuses on how and when carbon becomes communicable in different communities, to different political and material effects. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University and the Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment. She is also the convener of the Low-Carbon Methods Group, a network of scholars seeking to understand and shape how climate change not only stands to alter what we study, but also how we might do so.
Planetary Circuits: To Channel Greenhouse Metabolic Flows. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
This presentation explores the historical transformations of technoscientific understandings of space and their relation to nature and agriculture
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
As ecological catastrophe looms large on the horizon, the salvation promised by ecomodernism invariably passes through an intensification of agriculture and its caloric and metabolic extractivism – and becomes gospel in the centres of technocratic administration. This near future is commonly framed by the interfacing of greenhouse technologies and architectures with the system control engineering of industrial ecology: future agriculture – both terrestrial and interplanetary – seems to always pivot around the enclosure of the greenhouse and its relatives. To explore these futures and their different presents, this presentation offers a guided tour weaving together the hortus conclusus of the ancien régime, the imperial expansion of monocrop plantations, the high-tech agriculture of the Dutch Food Valley, and the dystopian visions of Soylent-based diets and their brood. Through genre-bending stories of agricultural futures and pasts, the circuitry of these metabolic landscapes becomes apparent, revealing the recurring frictions that structure these infrastructural imaginaries of the planet. As an experiment in narrative STS, the presentation offers insights on these historical and speculative constellations of future agriculture, as well as opening some possible alternatives for what they can mean for the social studies of science.
About the presenter
Filippo Bertoni is currently a postdoc at the Humanities Department of the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, where he gathers and edits stories that illustrate the transformations of animals into objects and data that shaped our understanding of nature. Bringing together social studies of science, natural sciences, and creative storytelling practices, his work inhabits the hinterlands between various disciplinary traditions in order to investigate how relations with nature are specifically situated, and how they can change.
Local, Slow and Sustainable Wool: System Change in the Fashion Sector with Wool as the Red Thread. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp and journalist Tone Skårdal Tobiasson invites the audience into the world of textiles, where currently an important environmental battle about how "sustainability" should be defined and understood. They showcase the role of the small and the local in the inevitable transformation ahead, and how green-washing is flooding marketing and policy strategies.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Wool is a small and marginal fiber in the global perspective, and constitutes less than 1 % of the total market. Synthetic fibers, on the other hand, are more than 60% of the market, and growing rapidly. Not everyone realizes that synthetic textiles are part of the plastic problem, and at the same time as the industry is promoting the increase in polyester, acrylic and other fossil-based fibers over renewable and regenerative natural fibers. Our policy-makers are also indirectly ensuring this worrisome development. How is this possible? The lecture will build on the Norwegian Research Council project KRUS (https://www.oslomet.no/om/nyheter/sluttrapport-ull-prosjektet-krus), an on-going project on rangeland grazing, and also two small projects – WOOLUME and hiWOOL, the latter two financed by EEA Norway Grants, and seeking knowledge-transfer from KRUS to local Polish and Portuguese circumstances. We will aim to offer a peak into the on-going work with local clothes, for example in the Fibershed (fibershed.org) cooperation and the transformation to regenerative farming and grazing practices. The lecture will summarize a book Klepp and Tobiasson have edited and written along with researchers and practitioners from many different fields, varying from Economics to knowledge on Indigenous peoples’ handicrafts. The book will be available later this fall, and is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
About the presenters
Ingun Grimstad Klepp is Professor of clothing and sustainability at Consumption Research Norway, located at Oslo Metropolitan University. The relationship between textiles, social and physical characteristics and how these are woven together is at the core of her interest. She hates waste and loves to spin threads and words together into texts and textiles as well as to share the joy of developing knowledge. Klepp wrote her MA and PhD in Ethnology on leisure time and outdoor life at the University of Oslo. She combines historical perspectives with knowledge of the textile's technical properties and social aspects.
Tone Skårdal Tobiasson, journalist and author, went from managing editor of fashion magazines in Norway to become a founder of NICE (Nordic Initiative Clean & Ethical) Fashion, originally a platform for sustainable development within the Nordic Fashion Association. Currently she is responsible for dissemination for several major research projects in Norway, related to wool, localism, sustainable, slow and regenerative fashion. She is a contributor to EcoTextile News and other international publications, and is a Board member of Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion.
Together they have written:
- Ren ull (Aschehoug)
- Norsk strikkehistoire (Vormedal)
- Strikk med norsk ull (Vormedal)
- Lettstelt – rene klær med lite arbeid og miljøbelastning (Solum Bokvennen)
- Lettkledd – velkledd med lite miljøbelastning (Solum Bokvennen)
- Lettfiks – klær med ni liv (Solum Bokvennen)
They have also co-edited:
- Local, Slow and Sustainable Fashion Fibres: Wool as a fabric for change (Palgrave Macmillan)
Tracking Landscapes: From the Kalahari Desert to Norway. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
This talk by environmental anthropologist Pierre du Plessis explores the skilled practice of tracking as a method for noticing and theorizing landscape change. Beginning with an overview of my work in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana, he shows how tracking involves an attunement to broader landscape relations in ways that exceed the exclusive relationship to animals usually associated with tracking.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
This talk explores the skilled practice of tracking as a method for noticing and theorizing landscape change. Beginning with an overview of my work with San” Master Trackers” in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana, I will show how tracking involves an attunement to broader landscape relations in ways that exceed the exclusive relationship to animals usually associated with tracking.
Du Plessis will then introduce his new project at OSEH that builds on lessons from my previous research to “track” the movement of knowledge, value, and species in the emergence of a noncontiguous zone of beef production/consumption that connects across the Global North and Global South in sometimes unexpected ways. This research takes a two-pronged approach to explore how trade agreements that bring large quantities of Botswana beef to Norway impact multispecies communities in both countries. Critically, this project asks: How do cattle from Botswana’s Kalahari Desert play a role in shaping Norwegian agricultural and industrial landscapes? Conversely, how do Norwegian tastes for fine cut beef impact Kalahari landscapes?
About the presenter
Pierre du Plessis is an environmental anthropologist who studies the skilled practices of tracking and gathering as modes of noticing Kalahari Desert landscapes. His research seeks to describe more-than-human landscapes and contemporary transformation to these landscapes due to the growth of cattle production and extractivist industries. He recently completed the Independent Research Fund Denmark’s International Postdoctoral Research fellowship, for which he was cohosted by Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town and the Centre for Environmental Humanities, Aarhus University. Pierre is currently a researcher at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of Oslo.
WEBINAR: Action Stories: Reaffirming Engagement. Environmental Lunctime Discussion
Artist and activist Jordan Seiler talks us through his text ´Reaffirming Engagement´, which considers the artistic and activist strategies of ´subvertising´ as a means of breathing life back into our streets post-covid-19. In particular, he´ll shed light on how this form of civil disobedience challenges the dominant narratives presented to us in our shared public spaces, and how a civic-media alternative is beneficial to the health and well-being of a city and its inhabitants.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Reaffirming Engagement: Breathing life back into our streets post-covid-19:
https://www.actionstories.no/stories-actions/reaffirming-engagement
About the presenter
Jordan Seiler (b. 1979, US) is a New York-based artist and activist working with issues of advertising and collective agency in public space. Since the early 2000s, Seiler has coopted billboards and advertising spaces to display his own work and has notoriously orchestrated large-scale 'takeovers' to draw attention to the overwhelming amount of advertising in public space as well as to bring into question the ownership of that space.
About the Action Stories miniseries
This webinar is the second in a series of three lunchtime discussions co-hosted by Growlab and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities to mark the launch of Action Stories: a new online platform that aims to explore and convey through essays, interviews, artworks and actions how the covid-19 crisis could re-calibrate socio-ecological thinking and our individual and collective relationship to nature and each other.
Action Stories launched in March 2021 with a series of six newly-commissioned texts and artworks by Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Anders Sunna, Jordan Seiler, Bill Posters, Sarah Prosser and Amy Franceschini covering three distinct but interrelated topics: Indigeneity and the Green Return; Urban Commons; and Radical Economies.
WEBINAR: Action Stories: Mapping a Better World. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Sarah Prosser and Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) discuss their interdisciplinary collaboration for Action Stories, which brings the two together to reflect on the seemingly unrelated fields of geology and social innovation.
Time and place: June 9, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
About the presenter
Sarah Prosser is originally a geologist and had her own research group working on 'rift-related sequence stratigraphy' before moving from the UK to Norway in the late 1990s.
In 2015 Sarah started in a position working with grassroots social innovation and social entrepreneurship in the Tøyen area of Oslo. Here she founded neighborhood incubator Tøyen Unlimited, as well taking the initiative to implement participatory budgeting for the first time in Norway, and trial projects around different forms of alternative community currencies. As country manager for Ashoka, Sarah represented the world's largest global network for social entrepreneurship and changemaking in Norway. She also lectures in social innovation for social workers at VID in Oslo. Sarah was a co-founder of Oslo's Human Rights Human Wrongs documentary film festival, worked at UNEP's centre GRID-Arendal with matters concerning the UN Law of the Seas and led British Council Norway, the UK's international cultural organisation for the arts, education and inclusion. She is originally from Edinburgh in Scotland.
About Futurefarmers
Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding us. Founded in 1995, the design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and research interests. Futurefarmers consists of artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, writers and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of "not knowing". Futurefarmers work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim, MAXXI in Rome, Italy, Sharjah Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo, New York Hall of Sciences and the Walker Art Center.
About the Action Stories miniseries
This webinar is the final in a series of three lunchtime discussions co-hosted by Growlab and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities to mark the launch of Action Stories: a new online platform that aims to explore and convey through essays, interviews, artworks and actions how the covid-19 crisis could re-calibrate socio-ecological thinking and our individual and collective relationship to nature and each other.
Action Stories launched in March 2021 with a series of six newly-commissioned texts and artworks by Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Anders Sunna, Jordan Seiler, Bill Posters, Sarah Prosser and Amy Franceschini covering three distinct but interrelated topics: Indigeneity and the Green Return; Urban Commons; and Radical Economies.
WEBINAR: Action Stories: The Story of Terra Nullius. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Sami scholar Liisa-Rávná Finbog discusses The Story of Terra Nullius, a deeply-moving and personal account of her Indigenous upbringing and Sami perspectives on land, nature, sovereignty, ownership and resource extraction.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom
About the presenter
Liisa-Rávná Finbog is a Sami archaeologist and museologist from Oslo/ Vaapste/ Skánit on the Norwegian side of the border. She lives in Oslo, is currently a research fellow in museology at the University of Oslo, and has just completed her dissertation on the relationship between Sami identity, duodji and Sami museums (defense scheduled for April 2021). She is also a duojár i.e. one who does duodji, and gives both courses and workshops in traditional Sami techniques and practices.
Mini series
This webinar is the first in a series of three lunchtime discussions co-hosted by Growlab and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities to mark the launch of Action Stories: a new online platform that aims to explore and convey through essays, interviews, artworks and actions how the covid-19 crisis could re-calibrate socio-ecological thinking and our individual and collective relationship to nature and each other.
Action Stories launched in March 2021 with a series of six newly-commissioned texts and artworks by Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Anders Sunna, Jordan Seiler, Bill Posters, Sarah Prosser and Amy Franceschini covering three distinct but interrelated topics: Indigeneity and the Green Return; Urban Commons; and Radical Economies.
WEBINAR: Anthropocene Anthropotechnics: Spiritual Technics and the Technologies of Repair. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Impatient to act, we are wary of anything that looks like time-wasting, and an action demanding as much time and patience as attention inevitably slows things down. Yet slowness is not opposed to change; changing human behaviour is slow work, and change in human behaviour is now what is at stake. Simone Kotva, research fellow at the Faculty of Theology at UiO, shares her perspectives.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Technological fixes and climate repair schemes have only a short term impact unless there is significant change in human behaviour. In this sense, climate repair is an ethical question before and certainly simultaneously with it being an atmospheric and geo-physical one; or, to put it in the terms Pierre Hadot once used (while applying them to a planetary crisis he could envisage only dimly), it is a question of “spiritual technologies” as much as – if not more than – of techno-fixes pertaining to carbon capture. Techno-fixing the earth implies fixing techniques of human ways of earth-living, confirming thereby the perils of attempting environmental action without critical thinking engaged at the level of habit and practice. As hazardous as it is to ignore the summons of the present emergency, as hazardous is it to throw out the spiritual technologies that would facilitate the long-term transformation of human behaviour that will address the causes of the crisis at hand. In this talk I offer a critical perspective on the recent return of spiritual exercises in cultural theory and philosophy, drawing out the ecological implications of Peter Sloterdijk's seminal analysis in You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2009/2013). What is the relationship between this return of spiritual exercises and religion, and what is the postsecular future of ecological thought?
About the speaker
Simone Kotva is Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. She is part of a working group investigating new narratives of anthropology and cosmology as part of the ECODISTURB: Ambivalences of Nordic Nature project funded by UiO:Norden. Simone received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and has taught at Cambridge and Gothenburg. Her first book, Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2020), tackles the importance of Simone Weil’s concept of attention for critical theory and practice today, especially in relation to ecological thinking. Her current work investigates the relationship between spiritual technics and the technologies of repair. In 2020-2021 she convened Magic and Ecology, and is currently working, together with Dr Alice Tarbuck, on a co-authored monograph addressing attention as a spiritual technology for the transformation of earth: Spellwork for a Damaged Planet: Magic and Ecology.
WEBINAR: When Mimicry is the Last Song Left. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
What messages are coded through the nonhuman voice? How do animals witness, record, and replay the sounds of anthropogenic incursion? How might their calls pluralize human narratives of extinction and biodiversity loss? This talk will consider bird mimicry as an agential and unsettling sonic facsimile, sent live and direct from The Field. Mark Peter Wright, postdoctoral researcher at CRiSAP, University of the Arts, London, shares his research.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Nonhuman voices are often associated with notions of a “great animal orchestra”. Howls, calls, and songs, heard through traditions of soundscape studies and acoustic ecology, are studied through musical filters that remain suspiciously human. Western centric obsessions with tone and harmony further transpose animal agency into scalable models or representations, guided by a privilege towards the virtuoso songster or collaborative chorus. What else might lurk beyond the triangulation of birdsong, music, and science? What performative utterances might glitch these constructed naturalisms and what are the consequent strains for listening and learning?
In this talk Mark Peter Wright will present three examples of bird mimicry that transmit extra-linguistic commentary on anthropogenic climate change. He will amplify the political ecology of nonhuman sound by interlacing issues of expertise, witnessing, and the responsibilities embroiled in multi-sited fieldwork.
About the speaker
Mark Peter Wright is an artist-researcher working at the intersection of sound arts, experimental pedagogy and critical theory. His practice investigates relations of capture and mediation between humans and nonhumans, sites and technologies, observers and subjects. Ongoing questions include: how does environmental sound convey complex geopolitical meaning? How can technology be practiced with an eco-critical sensitivity and how might listening operate beyond the human? Working between the field and lab, site and gallery, audible and inaudible, he is committed to amplifying forms of power and agency within the creative use of documentary media and site-based praxis.
POSTPONED: National Park in Østmarka. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
There has been proposed to establish a national park in Østmarka south of Oslo. It will eventually be the first one in a lowland coniferous forest in Norway. In this talk, professor Leif Ryvarden, professor in mycology at the University of Oslo, will give us his perspectives on the many national parks around Norway.
Time and place: May 12, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
For a long time almost all national parks in Norway have been established in government owned areas- partly because it was easier – no objections from other owners, and partly because it was cheap. Since almost all lowland in Norway is privately owned, this mean that almost all parks were established above he timberline or far to the north i.e. in the taiga.
After criticism finally 3 parks were then established in the Oslo –fjord area even if 95% of the parks is sea and the rest is skerries and barren shores.
As a reaction to this situation, there has now been proposed the establishment of a park in Østmarka south of Oslo by widening an already existing natural reserve.
Ryvarden will also give a short survey of the most prominent of the national parks.
About the speaker
Leif Ryvarden has been professor in mycology at the University of Oslo and have written some 300 international publications about wood degrading fungi from all 5 continents. He has written some 40 popular books in Norwegian books, either alone or with other authors. These covers different aspects of Norwegian nature, especially the national parks, all of which he has visited at least twice.
WEBINAR: Religion and Spirituality in the Race to Save Tropical Rainforests: An Introduction to the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
The tropical rainforest is the most diverse terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. It is both a symbol of the exuberance of life and has spiritual meaning for indigenous peoples and forest dwellers. Simon Rye shares his perspectives on religions' and indigenous people's efforts to end the destruction of tropical rainforests.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
The tropical rainforest is the most diverse terrestrial ecosystem on Earth, it is a symbol of the exuberance of life and Creation, it has spiritual meaning for indigenous peoples and forest dwellers, it is home to hundreds of millions of people, and it makes up an immense carbon sink without which the world will not reach its climate goals. Still, tropical rainforests are being destroyed at an accelerating rate that jeapordize the future of life on Earth. The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, which was launched in Oslo in 2017, engages the world's religions and indigenous people in efforts to end the destruction of tropical rainforests.
Religious and indigenous spiritual leaders can help develop an ethical argument that the destruction of the world's tropical rainforests is wrong and contribute to awareness-raising, engagement and stronger commitments by politicians and businesses. They can also help to connect with people at a deeper level and convey the spiritual dimensions of the relationship between tropical rainforests and humanity, and speak to the responsibility for saving tropical rainforests for future generations. The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative has been launched in five tropical rainforest countries and is implemented by UN Environment, in partnership with faith-based organizations. The initiative is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment.
https://www.interfaithrainforest.org/
About the speaker
Simon Rye is policy director in Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative in the Ministry of Climate and Environment, and liaison to the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative.
WEBINAR: Pollution Pittoresque. Representation of Smoke in Frits Thaulow’s fin de siècle Landscapes. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Frits Thaulow (1847-1906) was in his own time often referred to as the painter of "the Stream, the Snow and the Night." To this one can add "Smoke". In many of his most captivating landscapes, Thaulow captured signs of modern industry such as smoke from factory chimneys, and steam from trains. Øystein Sjåstad, associate professor in art history at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas offers his perspectives on the beautification of pollution.
Time and place: Apr. 28, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Pollution often creates spectacular color effects in the sky. Red sunsets can result from volcanic ash in the air, while dust, fog, and factory smoke can create many beautiful color combinations. Clearly, the look of cities, with new buildings and altered landscapes, is not the only thing that has changed in the modern world; the sky has changed as well. This is exemplified in famous paintings such as Jospeh Mallord William Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844) and Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1874). These artists were deft at making pollution look beautiful. What was once seen as aesthetically exciting is now — from today’s perspective — a sign of the human destruction of our planet. Modern art emerged at a turning point in the history of the Industrial Revolution — when industry went from being viewed as progress and futuristic development to a movement toward negative health issues and the destruction of nature. In this talk I will take a closer look at Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow's smoke filled cityscapes from Oslo, Paris, and Pittsburgh.
About the speaker
Øystein Sjåstad is associate professor in art history, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo. Sjåstad has published widely on European nineteenth-century painting including the monographs A Theory of the Tache in Nineteenth-Century Painting (2014) and Christian Krohg's Naturalism (2017). He is now working on an exhibition about Frits Thaulow in collaboration with KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes (Bergen).
WEBINAR: Sustainability is 'the Ultimate Design Brief'. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
A large portion of consumers emissions stems from the use of products and services which environmental impact is often determined in the early design stages. Design thus has a massive impact on emissions, how can release the transformative potential that lies in design? Jannicke Hølen and Knut Bang propose the following: If environmentalism's success was in spotlighting sustainability problems to the world, the success of design will be in helping deliver solutions.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
The creative decisions you make today have the power to shape the sustainable future of tomorrow. Traditional manufacturing is wasteful, because it focuses exclusively on the end user. The circular economy mindset looks much wider, to consider everyone who extracts, builds, uses, and disposes of things. By zooming out from users, to consider the wider network of stakeholders, we can unlock value at every stage of the process. As a designer, that includes building feedback loops into your work; knowing the life cycle of materials you use; collaborating with other industry stakeholders; and considering unintended consequences.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cover nearly every aspect of our future — for our planet, and for humankind. They concern all people, all countries, and all parts of society. There are 17 in total, and they amount to nothing less than a complete transformation of global civilization. And the deadline? The year 2030. But the ideas, solutions, buildings, and things created by designers, architects, and creative professionals will last far longer than any deadline. They will continue to impact and transform our world, its systems, and people for years and generations to come.
The SDGs are a design brief for the 21st century. On 25 September 2015, when the 193 Member States of the United Nations approved the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, (SDGs) they also created the world’s most demanding design brief. The SDGs are “universal”: this means they apply to every nation, every sector, every business, every profession, including design and architecture.
The SDGs are about “integration”: this means they demand a new emphasis on a systemic approach that does not sacrifice environmental and social considerations to economic gain, but rather seeks for true synergies and solutions that benefit people, nature, and prosperity.
Finally, the SDGs are about “transformation”: this means they challenge us to rethink the way we live, to rebuild all the systems that are degrading ecological and human health — and to make our world sustainable.
In sum, the SDGs are the ultimate design and architecture challenge: how do we create, and recreate, a world that achieves all 17 of the visionary goals that have now been agreed to by all the world’s nations? And how do we achieve this by the year 2030? The designers, architects, and creative professionals of the world have been handed a special and enormous responsibility, given to them by the 193 heads of state. They must imagine and bring to life the design elements of a new, sustainable world — quickly.
The Oslo Manifesto was about energizing a movement of designers, architects and creative professionals to embrace the SDGs as design standards for a new sustainable world.
About the presenters
DOGA is a driving force for sustainable value creation through design and architecture. We facilitate collaboration between creative talents and businesses and work to strengthen the role of design and architecture in shaping the Norway of tomorrow.
WEBINAR: The Recovery of Large Carnivores in Norway. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
What does the recovery of large carnivores in Norway tell us about the nature of conflict and coexistence? John Linnell, senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, offers his perspectives.
Time and place: Apr. 14, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
This talk will briefly summarize the history of large carnivores in Norway and Europe, their current status and the present management system, and will use this to explore the nature of human-wildlife interactions. Carnivore recovery has been associated with a huge diversity of conflicts, both economic and social. The way that these have developed provides many insights into the pros and cons of different ways of constructing paradigms of nature-human interactions in shared landscapes for the future.
About the speaker
John Linnell is a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim, and a professor at the Inland University of Applied Sciences, at Evenstad. He has worked on the relationship between wildlife (including large carnivores and large herbivores) and humans for more than 25 years in Norway, Europe, Central Asia, India and Brazil. A central element of his work has been to use the toolkits and conceptual frameworks of multiple natural and social science disciplines to build holistic insights into complex issues.
WEBINAR: Fictionality in New Materialism. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Why does the recent turn to matter in critical theory so often invoke fiction to explain its ideas? In this lunch talk, Tobias Skiveren, assistant professor at Aarhus University (DK), will discuss this question based his recent publication in Theory, Culture & Society.
Time and place: Apr. 7, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Throughout the last decade, calls for a return to materiality have reverberated within the humanities and social sciences. Few, however, have noticed that this return has also entailed a return to fiction, as the new theoretical writings on matter regularly include elements of storytelling, fabulation or other genres of invention. This talk explores why this alliance between new materialism and fiction has come about: Why do scholars united by a common interest in ‘getting real’ consistently utilize a type of discourse defined precisely by not committing itself to reality? Examining works by Jane Bennett, Dominic Pettman, Stacy Alaimo, Astrida Neimanis, Donna Haraway, and Rebekah Sheldon, I’ll try to answer these questions by tracing three modes of fictionality in new materialism distinguished by inventing non/human entanglements, scientific knowledge, and future societies respectively. On this basis, the talk argues that fictionality is a particularly attractive epistemological tool for attempts to transcend anthropocentric regimes of truth.
The talk will be drawing on my article “Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter”, which currently features as an e-publication ahead of print in Theory, Culture & Society. Video abstract.
About the speaker
Tobias Skiveren is an assistant professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, but he will be working this spring as a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo. He has written extensively on the intersection of literary studies, new materialism, affect theory, and critical posthumanism, and his work has appeared in venues like Theory, Culture & Society, and Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, and Matter. A Journal for New Materialist Research. He is also the author of several monographs on contemporary Danish literature, including Den materielle drejning. Natur teknologi og krop i (nyere) dansk litteratur (2016, co-written with Martin Gregersen) and Kødets Poiesis. Kropumulige kroppe i ny dansk litteratur (2020).
WEBINAR: Dynamic Territory: A Normative Framework for Territory in the Post-Holocene. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How to think about territorial rights and duties in a world where the relative stability and predictability of Holocene conditions are gone? In this talk, associate professor in philosophy Alejandra Mancilla claims that political theorists require a new model for thinking about land, natural resources and our relationship to them, and suggest how this may be done.
Time and place: Mar. 24, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Climate change will disrupt current political, societal and economic paradigms into the future. Here are some questions that a normative framework for territory will have to answer:
How should we approach a fair territorial arrangement for countries that will partially or completely disappear due to sea level rise or whose main productive activities, like farming, will be lost due to changed weather patterns?
How will we consider locals and migrants in a world where climate refugees are estimated to reach up to one billion by 2050?
How should Global Systemic Resources like rainforests be governed to guarantee their maintenance?
The project Dynamic Territory seeks to integrate the insights of environmental studies, geography and international law into political philosophy, to examine three transversal themes (people in flux, distribution of land and resource use, and the governance of Global Systemic Resources) and develop a novel normative framework for territory.
About the speaker
Alejandra Mancilla is associate professor in practical philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. She works on global justice, human rights, territorial rights, animal and environmental ethics. She is the author of The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and the co-editor of Theories of Justice (Ashgate, 2012). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Ethics and International Affairs, Philosophy Compass, CRISPP and Grotiana, among others. She has recently finished leading a three-year project entitled “Political Philosophy Looks to Antarctica”, which examined the moral grounds for territorial claims and claims over natural resources in the White Continent, as well as the legitimacy of its governing body, the Antarctic Treaty System. From 2021, she will be leading “Dynamic Territory”, a European Research Council Starting Grant aimed at thinking of a new normative framework for territory under post-Holocene conditions.
WEBINAR: Researching Environmental Humanities in Venice. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How do different universities engage with the question of what "environmental humanities" should entail? Five fellows in environmental humanities at Ca' Foscari University in Venice offer their perspectives on their methods and topics.
Time and place: Mar. 17, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
This introduction to the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice will highlight topics and methods epitomised by the University’s groundbreaking postgraduate degree in environmental humanities. As part of the first institute dedicated to this approach in Italy, scholars and creative practitioners from varied backgrounds are pooling their energies to contend with the climate crisis facing our planet. Indeed, a distinctive mix of critical debates and public engagement is helping to bring out the benefits of the humanities and social sciences in a Venetian context, especially in relation to perspectives on water. Along these lines, the Center is developing bespoke strategies for fostering environmental knowledge among diverse groups who have a key role to play in confronting the rising tide of challenges posed by the Anthropocene.
About the speakers
Heather Contant, post-doc fellow at the Venice Center, explores the collectivist tendencies of media arts through her research, teaching, and creative endeavors.
Ifor Duncan, post-doc fellow at the Venice Center, is a writer and inter-disciplinary researcher whose research concerns the relationships between political violence and watery spaces and materialities.
Daniel Finch-Race, post-doc fellow at the Venice Center, researches creative representations of environmental change in French and Italian culture since the mid-1800s.
Sasha Gora, post-doc fellow at the Venice Center, is a cultural historian and writer with a focus on food studies and contemporary art.
Emiliano Guaraldo, post-doc fellow at the Venice Center, researches the visual culture of the Anthropocene, with a particular interest in the relationship between contemporary art and the production of technical and scientific images.
WEBINAR: Plant-human Hybrids in Contemporary Fiction. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Can monstrous plants help human beings imagine and transform themselves into more sustainable creatures? In this talk, Dr. Astrid Møller-Olsen analyses fictional plant-human hybrids that question the nature-culture dichotomy and explore alternative paths to understanding the planet as a cross-species environment.
Time and place: Mar. 10, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
In a world where environmental concerns loom large in the media and classrooms alike, it is not only in apocalyptic or ecocritical fiction that we encounter ecological motifs and botanical characters. This talk examines three literary works, from three different generic traditions, that feature plant-human hybrids: Dorothy Tse’s speculative short story “Bitter Gourd Girls,” science fiction writer Chi Hui’s “The Rainforest,” and Can Xue’s surrealist novel Love in the New Millennium.
Recent scholarship in critical plant studies have highlighted that attention to botanical characters may help us understand, if not how plants communicate and sense the world, then at least how we imagine they do. Attempting to circumvent anthropocentrism, this radically non-human perspective, produces alternative visions of the planetary future as well as ecologically situated readings of human history. Combining ecocriticism with the figure of the monster (human-like, yet not human), this talk analyses literary plant-human hybrids in contemporary Sinophone fiction.
About the speaker
Astrid Møller-Olsen is postdoctoral research fellow in an international position between Lund University (Sweden), the University of Stavanger (Norway), and the University of Oxford (UK). She has a background in both comparative literature and Chinese studies and has published on fictional dictionaries, urban forms of narrative memory, and sensory approaches to the study of literature. Her current research is a cross-generic study of plant-human relationships in contemporary Sinophone literature from science fiction to surrealism.
WEBINAR: Climate Change Temporalities: Some Results from a Research Project. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In this talk, professor Kyrre Kverndokk will present some of the main results from the research project: “The Future is now: Temporality and exemplarity in climate change discourses”.
Time and place: –, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
‘Climate change’ is a conceptualization of an abstract, scientifically defined phenomenon. Climate change is not directly observable. The phenomenon becomes a defined object through numbers, graphs, or texts. To some extend these numbers, graphs, or texts are the object. Thus, to make ‘climate change’ meaningful in science, politics, public debate, and everyday life requires different rhetorical, linguistic, and semiotic practices. Climate change needs to be conceptualised, narrated, and exemplified to become meaningful, tangible and experienceable. The interdisciplinary RCN-project “The Future is Now: Temporality and exemplarity in climate change discourses” (2017–2021) has explored such practise through a number of case studies. The project has especially emphasised the temporal dimension of such sense-making. It has examined climate change temporalities in some intersections between Western scientific, media and vernacular discourses. In this lunch talk I will present some of the main results from the project, see https://future.w.uib.no/.
About the speaker
Kyrre Kverndokk is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, at the University of Bergen. He has published on the practice and politics of Second World War memory, the history of folklore studies and the cultural history of natural disasters. He is currently leading the research project “The Future is Now: Temporality and exemplarity in climate change discourses”. His latest publication is Climate Change Temporalities: Explorations in Vernacular, Popular, and Scientific Discourse, Routledge 2021 (co-edited with Marit Ruge Bjærke and Anne Eriksen).
WEBINAR: The Green Roadmap for the Cultural Sector. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
The green roadmap for the Norwegian Arts and Culture Sector aims to provide an overall status, set specific goals and propose measures to reduce the climate footprint in the sector. Project manager of the road map, Linnéa E. Svensson, will present the outline and discuss with you - are we there yet?
Time and place: Feb. 24, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
There is a high level of awareness and demand for sustainable and green initiatives in the field of culture. However, the arts and culture sector lacks unifying guidelines and tools to make an appropriate transition to green production. The sector itself wants to take ownership of the needed green shift and help develop the roadmap and identify effective measures and measures for more sustainable operations. Through close dialogue, it also becomes easier to encourage political intervention where we encounter regulatory obstacles.
The road map will be launched on the 9th of March.
About the speaker
Linnéa E. Svensson is a lecturer at the Institute for Communication and Culture at the Norwegian Business School (BI) in the area of Bachelor for Creative Industries Management, specifically Event Management. She has a cand.mag degree from the University in Oslo and BI with a major in Social Anthropology. She has since 1997 worked with festivals, conferences and other events in the areas of project management, production, sponsorship and sustainability. She is a sustainability consultant working in the event industry, the author of the Sponsorship Handbook for Festivals, the Environmental Handbook for Outdoor Events and Environmental Handbook for Norwegian Sports as well as other practical guides in Sustainability. She is one of the co-founders of the European network and think tank for sustainable events and music festivals; Green Operations Europe.
WEBINAR: Data Stories and Virtual Wildlife: Examining Future Directions in Citizen Sensing in Wildlife Surveillance. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Surveillance is increasingly used to sate the public’s curiosity for a window into the ‘secret lives of wild animals’. Citizens can now track their local wildlife through trail cameras connected to their smartphone, and they can follow live data streams offering minute-by-minute close-ups of wildlife nests 24/7. In this talk, Erica von Essen, Ph. D. and researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, asks: what does this digitalization of wildlife mean for human-wildlife relations?
Time and place: Feb. 17, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
The reach of surveillance technologies hints at the dawn of a new era for wildlife management in which wildlife are increasingly digital. Surveillance is said to beckon a new regime of ‘conservation by algorithm’ in which data collected by citizens are used to render wildlife movements “knowable” in ways that mean abstraction, calculability and risk aversion. These data often inform decisions to cull, conserve or intervene in wildlife lives. Citizen science has thus become appropriated as an instrument of biopolitics: controlling who lives and dies.
In this talk, this digital surveillance regime is considered as to its impact on human-wildlife-expert relations in terms of reconfiguring voice, power and agency. However, it also interrogates the changing role of citizens in wildlife surveillance. Are they grunt workers collecting data for the regime, or increasingly also consumers of wildlife in the virtual, through e.g. following animal livestreams, partaking in collection games and treasure hunts, and thematizing around the wildlife they see in their gardens? What does this mean for human-wildlife connections and virtual intimacy between the species? The talk discusses the unique and rapidly proliferating ways in which people engage with wildlife online in citizen science. It also discusses the affordances of technology for animals to ‘tell their own stories’, unmediated by edited nature documentaries.
About the speaker
Erica von Essen is a researcher with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Oslo and associate professor at the Department for Social Anthropology with Stockholm University. Her work in environmental communication and wildlife ethics problematize how human-animal relations are changing in post-modernity and how they are manifested in new roles and practices. Erica is involved in several research projects examining the biopolitical control of unwanted species in society, from wild boars to wolves out of place. She has published across a range of disciplines including criminology, rural sociology, communication studies, philosophy and environmental ethics. In recent years, Erica’s work can be found in presentations to parliaments, in popular media, and at human-animal studies conferences.
WEBINAR: Genomics, Ecology and Epidemiology of the Historical Plagues: Rethinking Modalities of Spread and Transmission. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
In this webinar, Barbara Bramanti, associate professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of Ferrara, Italy, will present some of the major outcomes of a multidisciplinary ERC-research project (“MedPlag: The medieval plagues: ecology, transmission modalities and routes of the infections”), and reconsider dynamics behind pandemics.
Time and place: Feb. 10, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
MedPlag made use of an integrative approach to test preeminent theories of Medieval Plague Pandemics, theories that have emerged in the past decades based on information about plague acquired at the beginning of the Third Plague Pandemic in Asia. By exploring alternative modalities of transmission of this infectious disease in the Middle Age and early modern times, along with the routes of dissemination in Eurasia, the project came to the conclusion that plague was most likely repeatedly imported into West-Europe from abroad, and that epidemics spread due to (direct or indirect) human contacts, rather than having been caused by rats and their parasites. By reviewing scientific reports and accounts of the Third Plague Pandemic in Europe, we also provided a plausible explanation about how plague disappeared from the continent from the 1950s and unearthed a paradigm that might also be useful in preventing further pandemics of any infectious disease.
About the speaker
Barbara Bramanti is Associate Professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of Ferrara, Italy. She has worked with ancient DNA (aDNA) methods on several projects at German academies (Göttingen and Mainz), and at the CEES, University of Oslo, where she has led the ERC AdG MedPlag (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/324249/reporting). She has published seminal works concerning prehistoric human migrations and provided the first consistent evidence that the past plagues were caused by Yersinia pestis. Her current research still aims to address open questions about the genetic makeup of Eurasia, as well as about infectious diseases by means of molecular palaeopathology.
2020
WEBINAR: "Surveillance Capitalism"; Nature; Acoustics; Conservation; Scientific Ethics. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
This talk considers the intensive research and emergent policy regimes that have cohered in the last 15 years around bioacoustics, e.g. the scientific study of animal sounds. What is the significance of sound in the animal kingdom, and how can it help us track biodiversity? Max Ritts, postdoctoral researcher at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) gives us his perspectives.
Time and place: –, Register for webinar on Zoom
While scientists have long recognized sound as “an important medium for intra- and interspecific communication among… groups of animals” (Krause and Farina, 2015, 245), their socio-technical ability to glean biological and ecological insight from the medium has increased exponentially, abetted in large part by inexpensive new monitoring technologies, social networking capacities, and broad planetary concerns. Bioacoustics is now regularly cited in a range of national species management practices - such biodiversity assessment, population count, diversity assessment, and habitat quality - which introduce new conceptions – “acoustic niche,” “noise exposure threshold” – of ecological form, function, and differentiation.
But bioacoustical practices are not only shifting understandings of perceivable nature; they are altering understandings of what nature is as well. In this talk, which draws from expert interviews (n= 17), bioacoustics texts new and old, and a survey of recent eco governance policy, we suggest that proliferating bioacoustical practices present enticing objects with which to puzzle through the dominant forces shaping contemporary multispecies geographies. If bioacoustics co-evolves with a “surveillance eco-capitalism” monitoring and managing the world’s non-human actors and ecosystems for economic purposes (Zuboff's "surveillance capitalism" thesis), they also point to worldings as yet unaccounted-for in capitalist value regimes, and through which new politics of nature are emerging.
About the presenter
Max Ritts is a postdoctoral researcher at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Alnarp, Sweden. He specialises in environmental geography with interests in sustainability, critical theory and creative methods. His research examines sustainability through a focus on environmental data cultures – a macro structure that increasingly shapes the way individuals, institutions, and diverse natures feature within natural-human systems.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: Using History as a Lever to Boost Meat Consumption in Norway. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Nov. 25, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar on Zoom
We consume more meat than ever before, and at the same time, meat is increasingly becoming a contested foodstuff. Despite the fact that western countries consume more meat than ever before – and indeed more than is generally recommended for reasons of health, animal welfare, sustainability and global distribution – the average consumer knows less about that meat and its role than before. At the same time meat consumption in Norway today is often justified by the past; by history and culture.
About the presenter
Dr Karen Lykke Syse is an agronomist, ethnologist and holds a PhD in cultural history. She works as an associate professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Her research interests pivot around landscape history, land use, environmental discourse and practice; and social and cultural aspects of meat.
WEBINAR: Volcanic Eruptions and Their Impacts on Viking Society - Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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!
Time and place: –, Register for webinar on Zoom
One of the key catastrophes in Norse mythology, termed Fimbulwinter (Old Norse: Fimbulvetr), has been described as the immediate prelude to the events of Ragnarǫkr – the twilight of the gods. This event has been correlated to the sixth century AD when Scandinavia has experienced the most radical social, economic and political transformations in prehistory.
In Scandinavia, large-scale abandonment of farms and farmlands is recorded in the 6th century. Most scholars today argue that this was linked to contemporary plague epidemics and climate change. The different social strategies for adapting to this crisis are, however, poorly understood. By investigating archaeological and climatic data from the centuries AD 500-800 across Scandinavia, this talk seeks to address topics related to human response to changes and disasters.
A great number of large-scale archaeological excavations in Southern Scandinavia during the last decades have generated a huge scientific material (settlements, production sites) for further research. Several hundred settlements and several thousand buildings have been identified through machine-based de-turfing. Many of these had more central locations than the classic abandoned farms. In particular, Iversen will discuss the elite response on the events.
About the presenter
Frode Iversen is professor at the Department of Archaeology at Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. He is a Viking Age specialist in the field of Historical archaeology, geography, climate and political systems in Northern Europe. From 2018, he takes part as principle investigator in a new interdisciplinary climate research group at UiO that received a five-year grant from NFR TOPPFORSK: Volcanic Eruptions and their Impacts on Climate, Environment, and Viking Society in 500–1250 CE (VIKINGS project).
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: Sustainable and Animal Friendly Food. Environmental Lunchtime Discussions
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.
Time and place: Nov. 11, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar on Zoom
The Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance works to change Norwegian agriculture to become more animal friendly. Meat consumption should be reduced, and consumers should have the possibility to choose food from animals with better welfare.
The Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance is a national foundation for animal welfare in Norway. We believe that no animal should have to suffer for financial gains, ignorance or tradition. The Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance helps those animals who need it the most, in intensive farming, the fur industry and in animal experimentation. The organisation has a staff of seventeen dedicated professionals, and is governed by a board of directors.
About the presenter
Live Kleveland co-founded the Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance in 2001. She is a lawyer and works mainly with political process and legislation. To read more about her organisation, the Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance (NAPA), follow this link.
WEBINAR: On Contemporary Art and Sun Media Atmospheres. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Nov. 4, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar on Zoom
The talk focuses on the group exhibition Sonne München, which took place in Cologne in 1994 and included works by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, and Philippe Parreno. Using the exhibition as a starting point, it investigates how artistic practices of the 1990s provoked alternative, relational approaches to visual art—approaches that mobilized the forces of matter, social alliances, and environmental formations against the anthropocentric world-view. The art object and the exhibition space alike became the means to enrich existing art discourses about what an object can do—formulated here as a speculation about the future.
Artworks were not to be regarded as autonomous or aesthetic objects in the traditional sense but rather as some sort of strange being: not alive, but capable nonetheless of creating social bonds and kinships. Based on how artists in the 1990s played with sensorial and environmental surrounds to address the intimate integration of bodies and media technologies, my argument is that Sonne München posed a series of process-ontological questions about what makes an environment and what makes a body: a perspective that, in turn, has broader implications for understanding bodies and matter in ecological and sun-atmospheric terms.
About the presenter
Sara R. Yazdani is an historian, art critic, and director for the art and research site K.O.S A. In 2019 she gained her PhD in History of Art and Media Theory from the University of Oslo. Her fields of research are modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on history and theory of photography, the relationship between art, media, technologies, theories of the Anthropocene and process philosophy. Her work is published in Art Journal (forthcoming) and a number of anthologies and catalogues on modern and contemporary art. She is currently working on her first monograph, Self-Sufficient Images. Art, Media and Ecologies in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans, a critical history of Tillmans’ oeuvre, and the re-emergence of an ecological, processual approach to art photography. Fall 2020, she is a guest lecturer in art theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Fine Arts, Oslo (the MA Art and Public Space program).
WEBINAR: Reclaim the Streets: Dismantle Advertising, Save Money and Rescue the World. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: –, Register for webinar on Zoom
Everyone should be concerned with the effects advertising has on our minds, our society, our culture, our biosphere and the survival of life. We (Subvertising Norway) see advertising as an existential threat and hold the opinion that someone must do something about it.
The purpose of advertising is to normalize and fuel the processes of consumer capitalism, processes that have carried us into the midst of social and ecological crises such as climate change, wealth inequality and mass extinction.
Subvertising is a form of civil disobedience that seeks to reclaim public space by replacing outdoor advertising with art. It is founded on the basic principle that the visual realm in public space belongs to everyone, so no-one should be able to own it. Public space should be a forum for dialogue, debate and the exchange of ideas – something that everyone should be free to participate in, not only the companies and organisations that can afford to rent our attention.
This short presentation introduces 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.
About the presenter
James Finucane is a writer, curator, producer and artist specializing in street and public art. He is the founder of Desire Lines and Street Art Oslo, platforms dedicated to producing and disseminating street art and its associated movements in Oslo and the surrounding region, and co-founder of Subvertising Norway, a non-profit collective of artists, activists and designers dedicated to questioning who has the power and authority to communicate messages and create meaning in public space.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: The Nature-Culture-Health Interplay in the Light of Environmental and Epigenetic Research. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion.
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.
Time and place: Oct. 21, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for the seminar on Zoom.
Environment and lifestyle may have impact on our genes both today and in the future, and resent epigenetic research indicate that our genes may be turned on and off as consequence of the way we are living. Health Promotion and salutogenesis therefore may have a positive impact on our genes. NatureCultureHealth – activites (NaCuHeal) are methods that may be useful to prevent both mental and somatic health problems in the future. These methods will be addressed and used as examples in the presentation.
Health promoting nature and culture activities are popular activities at the www.NaKuHel.no Centre at Sem in Asker, Norway. The centre is placed close to a forest, a lake and an area of nature conservation. Among the group activities there are: hiking, physical activities, gardening, music, singing, painting, dancing, dialog groups for men or women, ethics, painting and local history, etc.
Results from previous studies concluded that: Around 2/3 of the informants reported to have improved their health status, quality of life, function, and consciousness around environmental issues. Increasing the population’s participation in health promoting outdoor and cultural activities seem to be a useful method to enhance complete rehabilitation.
About the presenter
Gunnar Tellnes is a professor in Public Health at Kristiania University College, Oslo, Professor Emeritus at UiO, and Vice-President in Int. Academy of Science - Health and Ecology. He has an extensive portfolio of awards and positions relating to his career as both educator, dean and occupational doctor. His primary academic interests surround sickness absence and occupational rehabilitation, injury prevention and Green care and the Nature-Culture-Health Interplay (NaCuHeal).
WEBINAR: Acoustic Methods, Sound Ethnography, Climate Justice. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Oct. 14, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar on Zoom
The current condition of anthropogenic climate change is the outcome of centuries of colonisation, genocide and capitalist extraction. For many experiencing the frontline effects of rising sea levels, erosion, coral bleaching and increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters, these have always been entangled in existing environmental and social dispossession. While attention is drawn to spectacles of trauma or resilience, other stories of care between people, lands and oceans are also being told. How can we turn to listen to the slower and more nuanced stories, that imagine the world otherwise?
In this talk, Anja Kanngieser will introduce Climates of Listening, an ongoing conversation and collaboration with predominantly women, queer and transgender people in the Pacific (Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Papua New Guinea) working toward environmental and social justice. Using sonic ethnographies, the project centres relations between people and ecosystems by weaving together fieldrecordings, oral testimonies, poetry, song, music and radio composition. Attuned to the silences, gaps and faultlines in stories, the project seeks to amplify multifaceted and changing community narratives.
About the presenter
Anja Kanngieser is a geographer and sound artist. As an interdisciplinary scholar, they bring creative methods to the investigation of space and politics. AM’s current research broadly considers how sound reveals political, social, and economic relations between humans, environments and systems of governance. In their work AM begins with the premise of sound as a constant, a phenomenon that is always present – whether heard, felt, or sensed by human or non-human species and technologies.
WEBINAR: CoFUTURES: Pathways to Possible Presents. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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?
Time and place: Oct. 7, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
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? In this talk, I present some core ideas from CoFUTURES: Pathways to Possible Presents (ERC) and Science Fictionality (NFR), two current concurrent projects that explore how future fictions present planetary futures and offer different ways of understanding planetary challenges, including climate change, demographic change, and technological change. CoFUTURES believes that to better understand the future, be it of humanity, of other species, of technology, or the planet, we must engage with how people think with futures around the world. The project employs a speculative lens towards addressing issues of sustainability, exploring alternative visions of innovation, non-traditional visions of futures, and questions of environmental justice especially from the perspective of marginal or marginalized communities.
About the presenter
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. Chattopadhyay is also an Imaginary College Fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University.
UiO published an article about Chattopadhyay's research earlier this year: Science fiction about the future may provide solutions to today’s crises.
WEBINAR: Waste Collection and Circular Economy in Oslo. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
An introduction to the system for waste management, including a local example of resources in a closed loop; your food waste.
Time and place: Sep. 30, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
What does my waste have to do with the concept of Circular Economy? Well actually, your waste is the circular economy. The idea of circular economy is that natural resources should be kept in a cycle and be reused, rather than ending up in landfills, as emission from waste incineration, or on the bottom of the ocean. Sorting and recycling waste is about preserving the limited resources on this earth, in order to slow down and reverse the overconsumption illustrated by the Earth Overshoot Day. The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Waste Hierarchy developed by the EU are some of the models that create a framework for how waste management should be carried out to fulfill our future needs and political priorities.
Phosphor, Potassium and Nitrogen are vital nutrients for plants to grow, and main ingredients in the banana peel and scraps we throw away every day. Therefore, food waste from households in Oslo is a brilliant description of natural resources in a local, closed loop. Food waste travels from your kitchen table via local sorting plants to a biogas plant 50 minutes outside of Oslo. Here, the food waste is transformed to biogas – climate neutral fuel – and bio fertilizer. The fertilizer travels on to the fields where local farmers grow vegetables and grains, and one year later the natural resources in food waste are back on your table as potato salad and oatmeal. If you put your potato peels in a green bag, the limited and vital nutrients are ready for yet another round in the local resource loop.
About the presenter
Tale Skage Torjussen works as a communications advisor in the Agency for Waste Management in Oslo. She is employed at SirkuLÆR – the Agency hub for knowledge about source separation, recycling and circular economy. SirkuLÆR receives visitors from far and wide, and the employees lecture and preach the value of recycling to several thousand people every year. Torjussen has an MA in Peace and Conflict studies, and she sees the relation between access to resources and level of conflict as a driving force to contribute in the quest for a more circular economy, and a sustainable and fair society.
WEBINAR: Flying Carpets - Johan Galtung´s Untimely Visions from 1965. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Surpassing the wildest imaginations of the most progressive utopian architects of the time, Johan Galtung presented his vision of a virtual urban future at the very first national congress of the Norwegian Architects´ League on city planning in 1965. Galtung´s lecture evoked immediate resistance among the Norwegian architects who, in the aftermath of Modernism, have become skeptical towards grand utopian visions. In particular, Christian Norberg-Schulz argued explicitly against Galtung´s statement that in the future geographical locations will not matter anymore, and published one of his first texts on the importance of place. The idea of place-specificity would crystalize towards the end of 1970s in Norberg-Schulz´s Genius Loci, a controversial publication which nevertheless still happens to be a must-read in many architectural schools and city planning offices across the globe.
Galtung´s visions of a cybernetic city of the future might have been judged by the 1965-architectural scene as ´little too late´ and ´definitely too cool´. Yet, from our current perspective – as we are getting accustomed to genetic modification, virtual reality, online education and taxi-drones soon to occupy our skies – it seems as if Galtung´s visions have been ushered in just ´a little too soon´. At the same time, many of us increasingly aspire something local, a connection with a place we live in. It seems as if by now everyone of us has found a way to internalize both the cybernetic way of life as well as the desire for locality. This webinar is taking us back to the moment in history when both ideas manifested as clear oppositions and invites to imagine what could be next.
About the presenter
Beata Labuhn was born in Gdynia and studied Architecture at TU Delft and L´EPFL Lausanne, as well as Philosophy at Leiden University. Currently, she is doctoral research fellow at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) where she researches the history of the entanglements between architecture and environmentalism in Norway, focusing on cases studies from the 1960s and the 1970s. Read more about Beata's work here.
WEBINAR: Anthropocene Temporalities in Videogames. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Sep. 16, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
Game scholar Alenda Chang argues that videogames are “mesocosms” – or miniature ecosystems that feature abstract principles from the real world, treading “a fine line between bounded tidiness and inclusive reality” (2019, 21).
This talk briefly introduces the potential of videogames as environmental media by focusing on the way they engage with what I call Anthropocene temporality. In particular, I highlight a trope that has become popular in so-called god games recently: the move from map-style interfaces to the use of whole Earth images and models. This trope signals an overt and growing – although as I will point out, imperfect – engagement with planetarity: an emerging worldview that posits the planet as a world-ecology, one that imbeds both human and nonhuman forces while calling for a renewed attendance to the ethics and aesthetics of relationality.
At the same time, my talk will also note the perpetuation in videogames of generic tropes and conventions like the tech tree and expansionist gameplay – which run counter to their environmentalist message. In doing so they videogames stage a dynamic at the heart of Anthropocene temporality, which casts humans as geologic subjects embedded in a planetary ecology that we continuously bump up against or seek to transcend.
Chang, Alenda. Playing Nature: Ecology in Videogames. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
About the presenter
Laura op de Beke is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo with a background in North American Studies and Literary Studies though in recent years her research has shifted to videogame studies and the environmental humanities more generally. She is currently working on a dissertation on the Anthropocene temporalities of videogames. This work is part of a larger research project called Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present. In collaboration with OSEH, Laura also hosts a monthly environmental humanities reading group, a record of which can be accessed here.
WEBINAR: Plant knowledge from the past for the future. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Sep. 9, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
Throughout history people have been dependent on plants for food, fodder, materials, clothes and medicine. Human interference has affected plant diversity and sometimes caused plant extinctions, furthermore, has biodiversity affected humanly practice. A current worldwide decrease in plant diversity threatens ecosystems and human health. Scandinavia has a limited number of threatened plants compared to other areas. People living here maintain a close relationship with nature and plants. Scandinavia is therefore an ideal place for studying past and current people-plant-dynamics.
The SAMKUL-funded research project Nordic People and Plants. Rediscovering and Safeguarding Nordic Ethnobotanical Heritage aims at understanding people's knowledge on and use of plants from the Viking age and until today, with the purpose of revitalizing people and plant relations for the future. The project collects archeobotanical, botanical, ethnobotanical, historical, literary and iconographical sources to plant uses, covers vast time-periods, several scientific disciplines and collaborates widely with various interest associations genuinely dedicated to revitalizing local plant traditions.
About the presenter
Karoline Kjesrud, Associate Professor at the Museum of Cultural History, is a researcher in the fields of philology and art history, with a background in interdisciplinary medieval studies. In the ongoing research project "Nordic People and Plants. Rediscovering and Safeguarding Nordic Botanical Heritage", Kjesrud investigates Viking and medieval people’s relation to, and knowledge about plants, available in iconography, medieval written sources, and archaeobotany.
WEBINAR: UiO:Energy – Then, Now and in the Future. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
UiO:Energy is one of three strategic priority areas at the university of Oslo – focusing on how energy is a key factor in fighting climate change and achieving sustainable societies. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the initiative bring together expertise from law, the social sciences, humanities, technology and natural sciences. Acting both as a coordinating hub for ongoing activities and as a catalyst for new initiatives, UiO:Energy aims to strengthen research, education, innovation and outreach within sustainable energy at the University of Oslo.
This talk will try to shed some light upon what UiO:Energy is, what it isn’t, and why there is a need for such an initiative at UiO. In addition to what has been achieved so far, short- and long-term plans for the initiative will be outlined. Finally, several funding schemes, both for students and staff, are available through UiO:Energy, and these will be presented briefly.
About the presenter
Vebjørn Bakken is a theoretical chemist and the director of UiO:Energy. Prior to that, from 2011-2018 he headed the Centre for Materials Science and Nanotechnology (SMN). Bakken has also had several research and teaching positions, and amongst other contributed to establishing a research school in solar cell technology as part of the The Norwegian Research Centre for Solar Cell Technology.
WEBINAR: Diverse Ways of Knowing in Environmental Decision-Making. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: June 10, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
There are myriad ways of experiencing and understanding the world around us, and yet, knowledge arising from structured scientific investigation is often favoured in formal processes of environmental management. In this talk, Fern Wickson will briefly present two recently completed projects (biodiverSEEDy and the Agri/Cultures project) that demonstrate the added value of inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to research. One example being how the learning from these two projects grew into the Seed Cultures Initiative and the creation of the Svalbard Ark - an archive of visual artworks telling stories about cultural connections with seeds, buried deep in a mountain in the Arctic alongside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The presentation of these projects specifically notes that despite the richness that came with adopting inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to research, challenges remained for having the social, cultural and ethical aspects revealed incorporated into the more formal structures of environmental decision-making.
Having now moved from academic research on sustainable agriculture into the intergovernmental management of marine mammals, Wickson will close by highlighting how similar challenges can also be found in this arena. Seeing the persistence of these struggles to have diverse ways of knowing inform environmental management and decision-making, participants in the seminar are invited to share inspiring examples and strategies for influence from their own fields of practice.
About the presenter
Committed to ecological ethics and a politics of socio-ecological care, Fern Wickson has always worked across the science/policy interface, with a specific interest in the integration of environmental science, philosophy, indigenous knowledge, and stakeholder views in the pursuit of sustainable food systems. Before becoming the Scientific Secretary of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO) in 2018, Fern worked as a Research Professor of environmental governance and leader of the transdisciplinary collaborative for Responsible and Sustainable Biotechnoscience (RootS) at GenØk Centre for Biosafety in Tromsø, Norway. She has served as an expert delegate to the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) working group on the diverse conceptualization of values in nature, been a member of the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board, and is a past President of the international Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies (S.Net). She is also a yoga and meditation teacher and runs her own studio – The Peaceful Wild – in her spare time.
WEBINAR: Undermine - A Women's Activist Community in Response to Fracking. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: June 3, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
Undermine records the experiences of a community campaigning against fracking in Lancashire, UK. It is made with the cooperation of the community of local protectors, many of them middle-aged women, who are engaging in political action for the first time in their lives. The film explores the phenomenon of this generally overlooked demographic of older women finding their political voices, as their daily lives become destabilised. Following these women over three years of protest, at the roadside outside the fracking site, and in their domestic lives, the film investigates the psychological implications of being undermined, environmentally, democratically and emotionally.
Undermine is not a protest film, it is a film about our relationship to the ground that we walk on, the land that we live upon, and how, when the stability of this physical, emotional and political bedrock is threatened, the routines of our daily lives begin to unravel.
About the presenter
Rebecca Birch makes art works that communicate the relationship between people and their local landscapes, exploring how we relate to the landscapes that we inhabit, the 'ground' that is the backdrop for our daily lives. Engaging with geology, botany, lichenology, but primarily, people, her works are developed from spending time with people in their local environments. The final art works are presented as performance, story telling, audio-visual installations and long-form films.
Rebecca Birch currently lives and works just outside Oslo, in Nittedal, having relocated from London in 2017. She was educated at Slade School of Art and Goldsmiths College, was awarded a PhD from Loughborough University in 2019, and from 2014-2018 was Lecturer in Fine Art at Lancaster University. She has exhibited widely, and has recently presented solo exhibitions at Waino Aaltonen Museum, Finland (2019), The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (UK) (2018) and at fig-2 at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015). She is the recipient of a number of awards and residencies including The Banff Centre, Canada, CCA Creative Lab, Glasgow, and LUX Associate Artists Programme. From 2010-2017 she initiated and co-directed (with artist Rob Smith) the live broadcast art project, Field Broadcast, transmitting live artworks direct from remote locations to computer desktops.
WEBINAR: The Chernobyl Effect. Anti-nuclear Protest and the Forging of Poland's Democracy 1986-1990. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: –, Register for webinar in Zoom
The talk presents a monograph, forthcoming with Berghahn Books.
For several decades, nuclear energy has been a symbol of modernity and a promise of science-led development, but from the onset, it also caused controversies due to the scale of risks it carried. The Chernobyl explosion was a spark, which ignited a completely new kind of protest against the communist authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland. Protests after Chernobyl – initially linked to the Soviet nuclear plant but later increasingly to domestic nuclear projects – spread dissident mobilization across new groups, cities, towns and villages. Coinciding with a generational and cultural shift in the Polish opposition after 1985, this spawned protest actions and dissident movements with a distinctively new “flavor”.
At the same time, the starkest protests against the most advanced project – the Żarnowiec nuclear power plant – reached their climax only some months after the first semi-democratic elections were held in June 1989 and the first non-communist government took office in September that year. This means that the history of Polish environmental protests necessitates a new reading of “1989” – as the beginning of a process, and not a watershed date marking the instantaneous switch from communism to democracy. It also begs the questions about the colliding visions of Poland’s emergent democracy and its quality, as perceived by both the former allies within the “Solidarity” opposition and the Communists.
About the presenter
Kacper Szulecki is a researcher at the Department of Political Science, UiO. He is the founder of the Environmental Studies and Policy Research Institute (ESPRi) in Poland, and he was also a visiting researcher at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies and at the Department of History and Civilization (HEC) at EUI Florence, a Dahrendorf Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance and a guest researcher at the Department of Climate Policy, DIW Berlin. He works primarily on environmental and climate policy as well as energy politics - the democratization of energy systems and the securitization of energy governance. He is also interested in dissent and protest. He edited "Energy Security in Europe" (Palgrave 2017), and is the author of "Dissidents in Communist Central Europe: Human RIghts and the Emergence of New Transnational Actors" (Palgrave 2019).
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: The Icelandic Turf House - More Than a Human Story. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: May 20, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
How can Icelandic turf house architecture be of value in “hold[ing] open space in the world for other living beings” (van Dooren 2014: 5) in pandemic times when communities and ecosystems are sinking deeper into devastation. In the early twentieth century, the turf house, the home of Icelanders for more than a millennium, was considered an obstacle to progress and was brutally eradicated. Advocating for renewed interest in this vernacular architecture, Grétarsdóttir and Hafsteinsson speculate about the loss of the turf house ontology and the human and nonhuman distributed agencies and dependencies embedded in it.
Challenging human-centered approaches to architecture, they approach the turf house as superorganism, consisting of complicated root systems, soil, fungi, microbes, plants, lichens, stones, wood, insects, humans, cows, sheep, etc. As such reflecting upon the turf house socio-material entanglements, multispecies relations, time and space as essential elements for creating architectural complexes of an interdependent and growing coexistence. The research is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach of art and science and will affect thinking on how future architecture can become accountable for forming new human-nonhuman relations, cohabitation, ecosystem thinking and doing.
About the speakers
Tinna Grétarsdóttir is trained as an anthropologist and seeks new ways of
combining research and art. She has researched, published and curated exhibitions
on art and neoliberal cultural politics, competing discourses of creativity, human and nonhuman ecologies and death. She has done fieldwork in Canada, Iceland Greenland and Finland. She is co-director of art-led research projects OH and Chill-Survive and is currently co-writing a book on architecture as multispecies organism. She is a caregiver of four children, a cat, plants, grows red beets and has been a compulsive tree planter.
Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson is a professor at the University of Iceland. He has engaged in fieldwork in Canada and Iceland on subjects like indigenous media, deep democracy, neoliberal cultural politics, heritage, and death and has published books, book chapters and articles in these areas.. His latest book in English is Death and Governmentality in Iceland: Neo-liberalism, Grief and the Nation-form (2018), co-authored with Arnar Árnason and Tinna Grétarsdóttir. The book is based on ethnographic research in Iceland that reflects on linkages between death and grief, the fluctuating fortunes of the ´nation-form´ and the different ways in which political power can be legitimised through the changing relations between ´nation´, ´state´ and ´individual´. Hafsteinson´s latest book in Icelandic is The History of Art Museums in Iceland (2019), an edited volume about the histories of twenty five art museums founded between 1884 and 2007.
WEBINAR: Malaria, Museum Things and Climate Change. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: May 13, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
Much like climate crisis, infectious diseases are extremely complex and multifaceted biocultural phenomena and impact the most vulnerable among us. After centuries of fighting malaria, it remains one of the most severe public health problems mainly affecting people in poor tropical and subtropical areas where the disease is widespread. It is transmitted by mosquitoes infected by malaria parasites and kills disproportionally children, pregnant women and people without immunity. There is no reliable vaccine available and the costs for those affected are often unbearable. Scarce resources and socio-economic instability hinder control while climate change scenarios point to an increase in incidents.
By putting the museum objects in the centre of our discussion as matters of concern, the aim is to find ways to approach an issue that is often difficult to even know where to begin with. This material perspective will provide us with small narrative bites, pieces of knowledge that will open up for bigger discussions on the profound implications of climate change for human health and health practices, a topic that is unfortunately of extreme contemporary relevance.
About the presenter
Ageliki Lefkaditou is a senior curator at Norsk Teknisk Museum and a historian of science and medicine. She is currently working with an exhibition on climate crisis. Ageliki is also writing on the history of anthropology with special focus on the interactions between science, society and culture, especially with regards to national and colonial politics.
WEBINAR: Ringstad Cycles - Agricultural Issues and Contemporary Art Practice at the Edge of the Forest. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: May 6, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
Øvre Ringstad Farm is a place to live, and to share with other people, plants and animals, in different scales. It’s a down to earth learning site. The farm is a pivot point for traditional small scale management of natural environment in accordance with seasonal changes. It is as well a place to harvest from thousands of years of neolithic culture. When merged with contemporary art, farming, life and growth can come to a focal point of change. Can small questions make big differences?
Parallel to individual works that include video, photography, sculpture, sound art, performance and installations, Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen mediate, write and transmit knowledges around artistic practices today. They founded Balkong in 1993, using their apartment as an exhibition space to question what art can be. The contexts and dialogues that artistic practices enable were central issues to their thinking. These home based experiences led to other activities. Together with artists from Thailand they initiated Sørfinnset School/ the nord land in Oarjelih Bájjdár/Gildeskål, Nordlánda/Nordland. Since 2003, this ongoing project focuses on the exploitation of nature, exchange of knowledge and small-scale architecture in the field of a broad aesthetical understanding of ecological realities of society, humans and nature.
Parallel to individual exhibition practices Søssa has worked long-term with radio and sound art projects in collaboration with Norwegian peer Yngvild Færøy; and Geir has nurtured a wide art practice informed by his Sámi ancestry. Since 2010 Øvre Ringstad is the center and point of their collaborative practice.
2013-2018 they organized Skiptvet: Agricultural Issues presented at Galleri F 15, Moss. In OCA´s exhibition Let The River Flow Søssa and Geir contributed with Holsbekken (RGB). Autumn 2018 Tromsø kunstforening hosted Søssa Jørgensen and Geir Tore Holm Collaborations, 1993-2018.
WEBINAR: Environing Global Infrastructure Locally: China’s “Green” Development in Southeast Asia. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Apr. 29, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Webinar in Zoom
China’s global investments abroad are increasingly framed within the language of “green” development. Yet such rhetoric – often understood to lie somewhere between earnest environmentalist concern and blatant greenwashing – chafes with China’s own multiple, and often conspicuous, environmental crises domestically. Scholarship on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global development-cum-geopolitical strategy, has thus far focused on its strategic and financial aspects, while interdisciplinary research on ecologies of Chinese building ambition has primarily investigated the environmental impacts of individual infrastructure projects.
What the environmental humanities can bring to this field is scholarship that links empirical studies of infrastructure with research into the socio-environmental phenomena and discourse they produce, enabling us to map the planetary, world-making nature of global building projects. This crucial dynamic has yet to be studied from a comparative, transnational perspective. In this presentation we outline a new, five-year research project that aims to bring critical, in-depth ethnographic analysis to the BRI’s encroaching presence across Southeast Asia. By revealing the complex roles played by large-scale infrastructures in the quotidian lives of the communities they touch, the project aims to demonstrate how infrastructure forges new places, subjects, environments and epistemologies.
About the presenters
Alessandro Rippa is a social anthropologist working on borders, infrastructure and the environment. Alessandro completed his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen and held postdoctoral positions at LMU Munich (www.highlandasia.net) and at the University of Colorado Boulder (www.chinamadeproject.net). In September 2020 he will begin a new 5-year research project at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, as part of which he will focus on the analysis of the social and environmental consequences of Chinese investments in Myanmar. He is one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands and author of an upcoming monograph on China’s borderlands with Amsterdam University Press.
Roger Norum is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the shifting practices of media, mobility and the environment, primarily among transient and precarious communities in the Arctic and Asia. His recent titles include Anthropocene Ecologies: Entanglements of Tourism, Nature and Imagination (Routledge, 2020) and Migrantes (Ekaré, 2019). He is currently a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Oulu.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: The ‘Palaeoenvironmental Humanities’. Understanding and Writing About Deep Environmental History. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Apr. 22, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Webinar in Zoom
Environmental uncertainty, climate change and ecological crisis loom large in the present and permeate scenarios of potential futures. To understand these predicaments and prepare for catastrophic scenarios, there have been repeated calls to explore the diverse human-climate relations of human societies in the past. The archaeological record offers rich, long-term datasets on human-environment articulations reflected in material culture and its relational entanglements. Much of these human-environment conjugations are, in the absence of written records, only accessible archaeologically, yet that discipline has played little role in the ‘environmental turn’ of the humanities or the climate change debate more broadly. Situated at the confluence of eco-criticism, environmental history, environmental archaeology, computational humanities, palaeoecology and earth-system science, and motivated by the ambition to articulate archaeological research traditions with contemporary concerns around future climate change, I frame the notion of the palaeoenvironmental humanities: a deep-time training ground for current ideas and theories on the interrelationship of human behaviour, climate and environmental change.
The key objective of the palaeoenvironmental humanities is to offer a rejoinder between ecological reductionism and the adoption of full-scale environmental relativism, opening up new interpretive and comparative terrain for the examination of human-climate relations. The vast temporalities of the Pleistocene promote alternative imaginaries of the human-climate nexus and the particular position of archaeology as an epistemologically omnivorous discipline spread out between the natural and human sciences allows for exciting bridge-building. By the same token, and precisely because archaeological data speak to the salient linkages between climate and society, practitioners are, I argue, increasingly obliged to engage with these societal dimensions and to reflect eco-critically on their own writings.
About the presenter
Felix Riede is associated with OSEH as Professor II, and holds a position as Professor of Climate Change Archaeology and Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University in Denmark. Riede is an evolutionarily- and ecologically-minded prehistorian who has developed a signature ‘palaeoenvironmental’ approach that fuses the traditional archaeological attention to human-environment relations across time with the narrative and ethical awareness of the environmental humanities.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: Exploring the Political Ecologies of COVID-19 in India. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: Apr. 15, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Webinar in Zoom
Global biomedical recommendations to manage and contain a pandemic cannot be accepted as universals, especially in the context of a developing country like India where over 90% of the population work in the unorganised sector and over 65% dwell in rural areas.
India started its battle against COVID-19 early, by the Prime Minister calling for a 14 hour public curfew. This was soon followed by a complete 21 days lockdown starting on the 24th of March. However, the consequences of the lockdown was disastrous for hundred thousand migrant workers who started on foot to reach their home in villages hundreds of kilometers away.
The most vulnerable ones
The pandemic has exposed the inherent socioeconomic and ecological inequalities in an already vulnerable and polarised society. This presentation is a reflective at understanding of what an unprecedented lockdown and a pandemic means for the most vulnerable, the state's capacity at managing it and the broader social protection while situating the current COVID-19 crisis in India within a larger political ecological discourse.
About the presenter
Anwesha Dutta is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway. She has a PhD in Conflict and Development Studies from Ghent University, Belgium. Her PhD research focused on political ecology of resource extraction, conservation and livelihoods in the reserved forests on the India-Bhutan borderlands in Assam, Northeast India. She is currently involved in an USAID funded project on corruption in natural resource management which will examine revenue sharing mechanisms between park and local communities in Kenya. She will also be starting her work as part of an NFR funded project on illegal river-bed sand mining in South Asia.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.
WEBINAR: Sustainability in Economics. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
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.
Time and place: –, Zoom (virtual event)
The neoclassical theory of economic growth is usually built upon a weak understanding of sustainability, with a high degree of substitutability between natural capital and human made capital. The result is that - at least on paper - the world can go on without the use of natural resources. There exists other theoretical perspectives in economics that take society’s reliance upon nature as a starting point. However, the mainstream economics education is currently failing to provide students, and ultimately policy-makers, with a sound understanding of what ecological sustainability entails. In this Lunchtime Discussion, Marie Storli will speak about her journey as an environmental activist and economics student, and about her work in Rethinking Economics Norway and how they hope to reform the economics education and democratize the economics discourse.
About the presenter
Marie Storli is the leader of Rethinking Economics in Norway. She is an economist with a masters degree from the University of Oslo, where she graduated at the end of last year. Marie started campaigning for sustainability at an early age, and it was environmental activism that led her to the study of economics. She wrote her thesis about the lack of sustainability in the standard neoclassical growth model, on which the standard climate-economy models are built.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Whales of Power: Rethinking Human-Animal Relations in Asian Religion. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How can the environmental humanities engage more critically with topics of religion? Associate professor in Japan Studies and project leader Aike Rots presents Whales of Power and the research project's main objectives.
Time and place: Mar. 11, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia (WhoP) is an ERC-funded research project (2019-2023). The project members study changing ritual practices and human-nature relations in the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on marine mammals. In this Environmental Lunchtime Discussion, project leader Aike Rots introduces WhoP’s main theoretical foci and case studies. As he will explain, one of the main objectives of the project is to rethink multispecies relations and animal agency in the study of religion. In addition, it seeks to contribute to a more critical engagement with the category “religion” within the environmental humanities.
About the presenter
Aike P. Rots is an associate professor in Asian studies at IKOS, University of Oslo. He is the author of Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (Bloomsbury 2017) and the co-editor of Sacred Heritage in Japan (Routledge 2020). His recent journal articles address a variety of topics, including Okinawan sacred groves, Japanese reforestation initiatives, the politics of “heritage” in East Asia, and corporate religion. He is currently doing research on Vietnamese popular religion and environmental change.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Norwegian Energy Policy: Land based Wind Power and its Impact on Nature, Diversity and People. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How does the construction and development of land based wind power affect nature and people's relationship to the outdoors? Vidar Lindefjeld, legal advisor and co-founder of La Naturen Leve, talks about the impact of interventions in nature caused by wind power structures.
Time and place: Feb. 19, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Norway has enjoyed green and clean electricity from hydro power for more than a hundred years. Seventy percent of our total domestic energy consumption is renewable. And yet, we build wind turbines all over the country, ruining nature and biodiversity. Why?
La Naturen Leve (LNL) fails to see the rationale in ruining nature, complicating peoples’ lives with noisy turbines and disturbing wildlife – in a country where vast hydro power resources have secured renewable power supply for a hundred years. The organisation opposes land based wind power in Norway and wants to stop all further wind power development. LNL promote the value of clean, renewable energy, and consider land based wind power to be devastating to Norwegian nature and biodiversity.
About the presenter
Vidar Lindefjeld is legal adviser and co-founder of the environmental organisation La Naturen Leve ("Let Nature Live"). It is the central umbrella organisation for individuals, local groups and organisations throughout Norway opposing the construction of onshore wind power plants.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Climate Extremes across Disciplines. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Earth system scientist Jana Sillmann introduces her work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and shows how climate extremes and their associated risks are assessed across disciplines.
Time and place: Feb. 12, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Climate change will most severely manifest itself in the impacts of weather and climate extremes, which will challenge inevitably existing human and natural systems. The three Working Groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are currently preparing their 6th Assessment Reports on state-of-the-art scientific knowledge on the physical basis of climate change (WG1), impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change (WG2) as well as mitigation of climate change (WG3). In this Environmental Lunchtime Discussion Jana Sillmann will speak about how climate extremes and associated risks are assessed across disciplines and the efforts made to better establish inter- and transdisciplinary approaches and communication to support decision making for risk reduction and strengthening societal resilience.
About the presenter
Dr. Jana Sillmann is Research Director at the Center for International Climate Research (CICERO) in Oslo, Norway and leads the Climate Impacts group. She holds a doctoral degree in Earth system sciences and is an internationally well-recognized expert in the field of climate extremes. Dr. Sillmann is co-leading activities for the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Grand Challenges on Weather and Climate Extremes, she is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) program and is a Lead author of Chapter 12 (Climate change information for regional impact and for risk assessment) in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6 WGI). She is further co-chairing the Development Team for the Knowledge Action Network on Emergent Risks and Extreme Events (Risk-KAN).
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Student Visions for a Green University. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How can the University of Oslo become a greener university? Christen Andreas Wroldsen, president of UiO's Student Parliament, will talk about the need to build a more sustainable UiO.
Time and place: –, 2531 Stort møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
The Student Parliament works continuously to push the University of Oslo in a sustainable direction, and it has called for significant change in the areas of education, research, organisation and dissemination. It is the highest representative body of UiO’s 28 000 students and consists of 36 elected student representatives. The assembly is governed by a team of five elected officials, who work full-time for one-year terms, two of whom sit on the University Board. In this short discussion, Christen Andreas Wroldsen talks about the need for a green university, the Student Parliament's vision for a sustainable UiO, as well as how we might get there.
About the presenter
Christen Andreas Wroldsen is the president of the Student Parliament of the University of Oslo. From 2018 to 2019, he sat on the University Board and was the Student Parliament’s Officer of Environmental Policy. He holds an MSc in Public Management and Governance from the London School of Economics and has studied history and pedagogy at UiO.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
2019
Climate History: Rediscovering the Socionatural. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How have past societies dealt with climate change? Dominik Collet talks about new approaches in the emerging field of climate history.
Global warming has sparked new interest in the way past societies dealt with changes in climate. However, much of the rich experience of historical climate changes remains unexplored due to disciplinary constraints. This talk will explore new approaches in the emerging field of climate history. It will investigate how we can integrate the ‘archives’ of nature and society in order to investigate how earlier societies socialised extreme climate events.
About the presenter
Dominik Collet is professor for Environmental and Climate History. He works in the fields of historical climatology, the history of disasters and the global history of things. He is a working group member of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. His current research focuses on the historical entanglements of climate and culture both in their material and in their mental configurations.
Before coming to Oslo he taught at the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen. He has held visiting fellowships at the Max-Planck-Institute for History, the Warburg Institute London, the Forschungszentrum Gotha and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) Bielefeld.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Sounding the Anthropocene from Iceland: Musical Style and the Geosocial. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Can musical aesthetics register the turbulence of living together with volcanoes? Tore Størvold talks about geosociality and the ecocritical analysis of Icelandic music.
Time and place: –, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Detail from bishop Gudbrandur Thorlakson’s map of Iceland, first published in 1570, showing the volcano Hekla.
In Iceland, there is a tradition of thinking about musical style and affect in geological terms. From Jón Leif’s classic volcanic tone poem Hekla, to contemporary art music by composers Haukur Tómasson and Anna Þorvaldsdóttir, musical style and structure is discursively related to seismic activity. Recently, the album Kveikur (“Fuse”) by the post-rock band Sigur Rós connects volcanic imagery to visions of environmental apocalypse.
In this talk, an analytic discussion of Sigur Rós’s music opens up a window into an Icelandic cultural history of inhabiting a risky Earth, captured in anthropologist Gísli Pálsson’s concept of “geosociality,” emerging from his ethnography among volcanoes. Geosociality allows for a “down to earth” perspective that accounts for the liveliness that humans often ascribe to non-living things. I apply this perspective to an ecocritical analysis of music, showing how musical aesthetics are registering the turbulence of living with volcanic environments.
About the presenter
Tore Størvold is doctoral research fellow at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. His research focuses on contemporary music in Iceland, as well as music and ecocriticism. He recently submitted his doctoral thesis with the title Dissonant Landscapes: Nature and the Musical Imagination of Iceland.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Being Salmon, Being Human. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Can we integrate art and academic practice to find new ways of representing other-than-human species? How do we engage in storytelling that adequately describes our kinship with the more-than human world?
Time and place: Nov. 13, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
We have invited philosopher, poet, performance artist and more-than human storyteller Martin Lee Mueller to present his work. Martin is the author of the book Being Salmon, Being Human and will speak about the potentials of combining artistic practice with academic practice to tell passionate stories about a more-than human world.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Visions of Sustainability in China. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How do people’s experiences and fears of air pollution transform into new visions of sustainability and creative forms of action? We have invited Mette Halskov Hansen to talk about the Airborne project, exploring the human dimensions of air pollution in China.
Time and place: Nov. 6, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
About the presenter
Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of China studies at the University of Oslo .She is currently managing the project "Airborne: Pollution, Climate Change and New Visions of Sustainability in China", financed by FRIPRO, NFR. She has previously worked as head of the Department of East European and Oriental Studies (2003-2004) and Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (2005-2006). From 2007 to 2010 she was the dean of research at the Faculty of Humanities.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Our Entangled Future: Short Stories to Empower Quantum Social Change. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Is it time to tell a new story about climate change? Karen O'Brien talks on the potential of stories to empower social change.
Time and place: Oct. 30, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
For this Environmental Lunch Time Discussion, Karen O'Brien will describe a book project where writers and researchers from around the world were invited to contribute short stories aimed to empower "quantum social change." The nine stories, each paired with a piece of art, highlight themes such as entanglement, indigenous knowledge, agency, and relationships with non-human species. The emotional responses to "Our Entangled Future" will be analyzed to assess the potential for telling new stories about climate change. You can find the book here.
About the presenter
Karen O'Brien’s research focuses on climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation including how climate change interacts with globalization processes and the implications for human security. She is interested in how transdisciplinary and integral approaches to global change research can contribute to a better understanding of how societies both create and respond to change, and particularly the role of beliefs, values and worldviews in transformations to sustainability. She is also interested in the potential implications of quantum social theory for climate change responses. She has participated in four IPCC reports and is on the Science Committee for Future Earth, a 10-year global change research initiative. She is also the co-founder of cCHANGE.no, a website that provides perspectives on transformation in a changing climate.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Sustainability and the Education of Future Teachers. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
What is the relationship between education and sustainable development? Elin Sæther talks about COSER, a research initiative aiming to explore education in light of today's complex sustainable development issues.
Time and place: Oct. 23, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
About the presenter
Elin Sæther is an associate professor in Social Studies Education at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo. Her research interests are clustered around sustainability and diversity in education, and she is one of the initiators behind the research group Challenges of Sustainability in Educational Research (COSER), an initiative to explore the relationship between education and today's complex sustainable development issues. Elin has a background in Human Geography and works both within the discipline of Social Studies Education and across disciplinary boundaries.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Beautiful Landscapes and Heavy Pollution. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Elisabeth Ulrika Sjødahl from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design talks about Beautiful Landscapes and Heavy Pollution.
Elisabeth Ulrika Sjødahl is a landscape architect, and is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape. She is the co-founder of International Workshops for Architecture and Urbanism (IWAU) and founding partner of Worksonland, which develops urban, architectural and landscape projects where water has a strong influence.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
The Worth of Water. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Can we extract water from Antarctic icebergs? Dr Julia Jabour from the University of Tasmania talks on efforts to design a legal regime to regulate iceberg harvesting.
Time and place: Oct. 9, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Changes in global climate and weather patterns are biting harder into the traditionally dry areas of the planet. There is already an international trade in bulk fresh water, but the largest source remains untapped: Antarctic ice, which holds nearly 70% of the world’s fresh water. This makes it potentially the world’s most valuable commodity—if only it could be harvested.
Although a futuristic idea technically, harnessing Antarctic icebergs has become the focus of renewed attention. The problem is, no international law explicitly regulates this activity. Now is the time to consider developing an international legal regime to regulate access to it.
About the presenter
Dr Julia Jabour is a member of the Ocean & Antarctic Governance Research Program at IMAS. She has been researching, writing, and lecturing on polar governance for more than 20 years. Most of her teaching and research is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, involving examining current scientific and technical developments, determining their utility to the policy and law-making processes, and translating that information into user-friendly knowledge for uptake by non-specialist audiences. Julia has visited Antarctica six times, and been an observer with the Australian Government at Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings on three occasions.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Safeguarding Marine Biodiversity in Norway: Threats and Possible Solutions. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Eli Rinde from the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) talks about threats to the marine biodiversity in Norway and possible solutions.
Time and place: Oct. 2, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
About the presenter
Eli Rinde has worked as a marine biologist for about 30 years, first at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), and since 2004 at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). She holds a PhD in kelp forest ecology and has special competence in the ecology of Blue marine forests such as kelp forests and seagrass beds. She has studied threats including climate change, pollution, harvesting, introduction of Invasive species and urbanisation, and has investigated coastal ecosystems by field sampling and field experiments through diving, underwater camera surveys, and by statistical analysis and ecological modeling.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Extinction Rebellion – Tell the truth and act as if this truth is real. Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
The science is clear: It is understood that we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We must act now. But how? We have invited Inger Østenstad from Extinction Rebellion to talk about radical honesty and tactics in climate activism.
Time and place: Sep. 18, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Extinction Rebellion is an international apolitical network using non-violent direct action to persuade governments to act on the climate and ecological emergency. Since it's formation in 2018, the activists from the do-it-together movement have gained a reputation for unconvential non-violent protests. "Tell the truth and act as if this truth is real” – the group demands that governments tell the truth about climate and ecological emergency and that they act upon it, to halt the loss in biodiversity and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Shades of Blue in Norwegian Climate Fiction: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Why is climate fiction so blue, and what is it good for? We have invited Sissel Furuseth to talk about how anthropogenic climate change is orchestrated in contemporary Norwegian fiction.
Time and place: Sep. 11, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
For obvious reasons, water is an important ingredient in Nordic climate fiction, acting as melting ice, floods and torrential rain, which may explain why so many climate change books are covered in different shades of blue. However, Norwegian climate fiction has been blamed for being blue also in another sense, as melancholic and gloomy. Is this a fair depiction if we take into consideration popular writers such as Maja Lunde and Gert Nygårdshaug? How does “the blues” of Norwegian climate fiction work and affect readers?"
About the presenter
Sissel Furuseth is Professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Oslo and part of the OSEH working group.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
You've got flight-shame, but what about smartphone-shame? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Is the information technology industry emerging as an increasing threat to the environment? We have invited Trine Syvertsen, professor of media and communication at UiO, to talk about reactions to toxic media, digital detox, and the 'slow media' movement.
Time and place: Sep. 4, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Within the humanities, the media are understood as harbingers of culture and content, but there is a growing interest in the side effects of constantly updating devices and technologies. The production and consumption of smartphones raise serious issues about the exploitation of natural resources, toxic waste, and energy use. Every time you upload a picture to Facebook or send a text message, a high energy-consuming data centre is involved. The so-called 'cloud' is not really a cloud; it is a very material structure with a large ecological footprint.
About the presenter
Trine Syvertsen is a professor at the Department of Media and Communication and chairs the project "Digitox: Invasive media, ambivalent users and digital detox" (funded by the Norwegian Research Council 2019-2023). The project studies movements and individuals who are ambivalent or negative to digital media and try to limit their engagement. While people retreat from media for different reasons, a concern for the environment and sustainability is becoming more prominent. Syvertsen will talk about digital detox as a reaction to toxic media and movements such as 'slow media' that are inspired by the ‘slow food’ and ‘slow city’-actions.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Is Academic Flightshame the Solution? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Do scholars fly too much? We have invited Kjerstin Aukrust to talk about academic flightshaming and the 2019 petition to reduce CO2 emissions from UiO flights by 50 percent.
Time and place: June 19, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, PAM 425, P.A Munchs hus
UiO distinguishes itself as a «green university». Yet in 2018, employees at the University of Oslo flew 62.2 million kilometers, equivalent to 80 return trips to the moon. Emissions from air travel is a major contributor to global CO2 emissions. Can the University of Oslo reduce its climate footprint and travel less by plane whithout impacting research, teaching and international cooperation?
Kjerstin Aukrust is an associate professor in French literature and area studies at UiO. She was one of the initiators behind the petition "Appeal for a 50 percent reduction of CO2 emissions from UiO flights". The goal of the petition was to encourage the University's rector and administration on all levels to promote initiatives that enable such reductions, as well as to encourage academics to act in ways that are responsible and sustainable in the face of global warming and environmental crisis.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Whales in Parliament - The Whaling Controversy in the late 19th Century: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Kristin Asdal from UiO's Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (TIK) talks on the whaling controversy in the late 19th century.
Time and place: June 12, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, PAM 425, P.A Munchs hus
Kristin Asdal has a background in economic history and a PhD in science and technology studies (STS)/ history. Since 2009, she is professor of STS at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (TIK) at the University of Oslo. Her work combines inspirations from STS, political science and history. She has been particularly interested in the ways in which scientific knowledge interrelates with politics and the shaping of political issues.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Have we been misconcieving matter and the natural world since Descartes? Arne Johan Vetlesen talks about his new book "Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism".
Time and place: June 5, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Arne Johan Vetlesen is professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. In Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism, he engages with the classic philosophical question of mind and matter, seeking to show its altered meaning and acuteness in the era of the Anthropocene. Arguing that matter, and, more broadly, the natural world, has been misconceived since Descartes, Vetlesen explores the devastating impact that this has had in practice in the West.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Sustainable Mindsets: How to educate for the future? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How to change educational institutions in times of climate crisis and species extinction? How to "green" schools and universities to build a livable future? This week, we have invited Sidsel Roalkvam, Director of the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at UiO to talk about sustainability in education.
Time and place: May 29, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Sidsel Roalkvam holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and is the Director of the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo. In her research she has worked on global health, maternal and child health, HIV and AIDS, religion and gender. She has previously been Head of the interdisciplinary research area LEVE - Living Conditions in developing countries. SUM was established in 1990 in response to the report of the Brundtland Commission: "Our Common Future". It is an international research institution which promotes scholarly work on the challenges and dilemmas posed by sustainable Development. The centre offers a two years master's programme in Development, Environment and Cultural Change.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Multi-Species Survival in the Ruins of Humanism: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How to create a multispecies city where nonhuman species feel at home? How to cultivate urban ecological alternatives from ruins? This week, we have invited artist, urban interventionist and beekeper Marius Presterud to share his experiences working with the Oslo Apiary & Aviary.
Time and place: May 22, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 12. Etg. Niels Treschows hus
Marius Presterud (1980) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo and Berlin, who works across a variety of media. He has toured Europe as a poet, as well as performed at established galleries, such as Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany, and Henie Onstad Art Center, Norway. In 2018, he debuted at Norway's 131. National Art Exhibition, showing sculptural and ecoventionist works. Common themes throughout his work are a focus on selfhood, significant otherness and societal health.
Oslo Apiary & Aviary works in the overlap between art and urban husbandry; Feeding birds, growing worms, keeping bees, growing trees.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Oslo Climate House - Staging climate in a museum? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
The Climate House is a brand new initiative at the Natural History Museum in Oslo. We invite project leader Torkjell Leira to talk about the challenges and possibilities of staging climate in a museum.
Time and place: –, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
The Climate House at the Natural History Museum will be an arena for communicating research on climate and the environment, primarily targeted to a young audience. Through the active dissemination of knowledge, sensory experiences and exploration of the solutions to current climate issues, the Climate House is to inspire visitors and the general public to change towards a sustainable way of life.
About the presenter
Torkjell Leira is project leader for the Climate House project at the Natural History Museum in Oslo. He is a trained geographer and has previously worked on climate change in the Amazon basin.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
The Cost of Music: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
What are recordings made of, and what happens to them when they are disposed of? Kyle Devine talks on the environmental cost of music.
Time and place: May 8, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 12. Etg. Niels Treschows hus
Kyle Devine is Head of Research and Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. He specializes in musical culture since 1900, with a focus on sound technology and an approach that combines music studies with media studies and cultural sociology. His book about the environmental and human costs of music will be published this autumn.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Contested Windpower in Norway: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Are we preventing climate change by large-scale environmental destruction? Jon Erik Finnvold (NOVA, OsloMet) talks on the contestations of wind power investments in Southern Norway.
Time and place: Apr. 24, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 12. Etg. Niels Treschows hus
This week, Jan Erik Finnvold will talk about "Preventing climatic change by large-scale environmental destruction? The case of wind power investments in southern Norway".
Jan Erik Finnvold is a senior researcher at the Welfare Research Institute NOVA, one of the largest social research institutes in Norway at the Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet). Besides his interest in the political ecology of wind-power, his main interests are social inequality, disability, health services, immigrant health and inclusive education.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene: Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
How do we link carbon and climate feedbacks to social feedbacks and environmental humanities? Dag O. Hessen talks on Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene.
Time and place: Apr. 10, 2019 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, 12. Etg. Niels Treschows hus
Dag Olav Hessen is a biologist with major interests in food web ecology and “ecological stoichiometry” in aquatic food-webs. He works at the newly started Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene (CBA), an interdisciplinary center consisting of talented employees from the Department of Geosciences, the Department of Biosciences and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oslo. The centre works to assess and predict changes in global carbon cycling by integrating research at various scales from the molecular level to organisms, catchments, and up to regions.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
How Green is Oslo? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Kjersti Kanestrøm Lie, project officer for the Oslo European Green Capital, joins us for a conversation on the 2019 Oslo European Green Capital Initiative.
Time and place: Apr. 3, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
What is behind the 2019 Oslo European Green Capital initiative? Why did Oslo become European Green Capital, and what will happen in 2019? This week, Kjersti Kanestrøm Lie, project officer for the City of Oslo European Green Capital secretariat will give us an insight into her work.
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome, please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Why do Environmental Humanities Matter? Environmental Lunchtime Discussion
Director Ursula Münster presents plans and visions for the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities in 2019 and beyond.
Time and place: Mar. 27, 2019 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, GS
About the event
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 10-15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We will invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. Speakers will be diverse scholars working on environmental issues, but also members of environmental NGOs, green businesses, activists, artists, or politicians. Designed to stimulate discussion, the presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome; please feel free to bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.