Introducing OSEH Visiting Scholar: Oscar Hartman Davies

We are very happy to announce that Oscar Hartman Davies will join the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities as a visiting scholar in the next few months! He is currently working towards his PhD at the School of Geography and the Environment, at University of Oxford, England. 

Photo of a boat on the ocean, mountainous background, clear skies.
Photo: Oscar Davies

I'm very excited to be joining the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities for the spring and early summer of 2022. Whilst here, I'll be working on my PhD project, sharing ideas, and participating in workshops and seminars, including the Situated Research - Exploring Place and Time through the Environmental Humanities seminar in June, something I'm particularly looking forward to. 

Portrait photo of a smiling Oscar Davies in snowy weather.
Photo: Oscar Davies

I am an environmental and cultural geographer working towards a PhD at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, co-funded by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council and Hertford College. I hold a master's degree in Nature, Society, and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford, where I researched the management of crown-of-thorns starfish, a large spiny coralivorous starfish species, on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. This much-maligned reef species, which is the subject of intense control and eradication programs, offers insights into many of the contemporary controversies and developments in coral reef management, particularly around questions of intervention, automation and digitisation, and naturalness.

My current PhD research is centrally interested in the management of seabird bycatch in commercial fisheries, and explores the cultural history of seabirds, the evolution of the concept of using animals as sentinels or bioindicators of environmental change, as well as the digitisation of fisheries management and surveillance through satellite technologies and on-board electronic monitoring systems (EMS). I have recently been particularly fixated on a project called Ocean Sentinel, which tries to use albatrosses equipped with GPS transmitters and radar sensors to locate and police illegal fishing activity in the Southern hemisphere and is the topic of a book chapter I'm co-writing with one of my PhD supervisors, Professor Jamie Lorimer. 

Alongside this, I work with the interdisciplinary Digital Ecologies research group, which researches the entanglements of humans, digital technologies, and nonhuman life in settings ranging from social media and VR to agriculture and environmental management. As part of this project, I am involved in an ongoing collaboration with social scientists, ecologists, and modelers to develop approaches to landscape connectivity modeling which are more sensitive to the agency and dynamism of landscapes and animals, and to the role of human-animal interactions in shaping animals' mobilities. I've also been a researcher at Environment and Climate Change Canada's Wildlife Research and Landscape Science division, and currently help to run Youngwilders, an environmental NGO focused on small-scale nature recovery and providing environmental leadership opportunities for young people in the UK. 

By Oscar Hartman Davies
Published May 4, 2022 1:42 PM - Last modified Feb. 24, 2023 12:47 PM