Arrangementer

Welcome to an open drop-in exhibition with presentations and performances by students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours Certificate.

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.

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.

Towards the end of the 19th century, there was a modest but regular export of block ice from Norwegian lakes to Algeria. Why is it worth talking about a commodity that was rapidly melting away in the Mediterranean heat? 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.

Bowhead whales have been known to three groups along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: Indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. Each imagined different normative relationships with whales, tied to visions of time, history, and the future. This talk explores how those ideas shaped interactions between human hunters and whales, and what we can discern of whales' own adaptations and— perhaps— ethical responses to their pursuers.

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.

What kind of careful attention to the meaningful lives of other species does film making engender? What sort of perspectives may it open up and/or foreclose? In this talk, filmmaker Asgeir Helgestad and historian of science Ageliki Lefkaditou, draw on three of their documentary projects on climate change and biodiversity loss to discuss how filming may convey the complex relationships that such processes provoke and threaten.

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.

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.

How do we use fiction to reclaim a better more sustainable future? These four short stories show us how.

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.

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.

This workshop will explore the writing of multispecies worlds. It will consider some of the challenges and possibilities of researching and narrating the ways of life of other species in their entangled, co-forming relationships. This is work that frequently involves moving between ethnographic, ethological, and ecological literatures and approaches in ways that raise difficult questions that are at once epistemological and ethical. The workshop will be led by writer and field philosopher Thom van Dooren.

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.

Troels Troels-Lunden (1840-1921) wrote in his thesis on everyday life in Denmark and Norway in the 1500s that 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.

How can we think of solarity through the lens of elemental media? 

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?

This presentation explores the historical transformations of technoscientific understandings of space and their relation to nature and agriculture

The lecture by 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 is being fought. The presenters guide the audience through the sad fate of wool in Europe, both quite concretely (about 80% is thrown away) and in the comparison tools where wool is designated as an even bigger environmental loser. They will showcase the role of the small and local in the inevitable transformation ahead and how green-washing is flooding not only marketing, but also in policy strategies with circular focus.

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. 

How can notions of queerness help us better understand the environment and what we stand to lose in the climate crisis?