Academic interests
- Visual Culture
- Archival studies
- History of Photography
- Operational Images
- Cultural Techniques
- Critical Agrarian Studies
- Critical Cartography
- Political Economy
- Economic Geography
- Rural Modernity in Scandinavia
Ph.D-Project
My Ph-D project focuses on an archive of 135 000 oblique aerial images of Norwegian farms, smallholdings and houses taken in the period 1955-65. My study will articulate and investigate the role of certain visual idioms and cultural techniques in the construction and management of Norwegian rural modernity in the industrial welfare state. The ambition is to understand how a specific regime of visibility and visuality recast a Norwegian agrarian imaginary beyond the material conditions the underpinned an agrarian way of life, and to expand the scope of agricultural visual culture beyond its traditional confines in landscape history.
One of the main goals is to understand how oblique aerial images crystallized the competing scales, visibilities and conceptualizations of post-war agriculture and rural modernity. Thereby positioning the mobilization of visibility as a key factor in the political economy of the image in Norwegian industrial welfare state. This tension will also be seen in relation to larger conflicts between transnational theories of modernization and inhabited agrarian and rural way of life. In essence, to position the cost and history of Marshall Plan Modernity as a history of images, representations and visibility on a larger scale.
Background
MA in art history from the University of Oslo.
