2023
South Asian Environmental Humanities - Environmental Humanities Lecture
In this Environmental Humanities Lecture, anthropologists Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, and Radhika Govindrajan, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, present their research on human-animal relationships, climate change, and religious ecology in India. What form might the environmental humanities take if considered from the place of the Indian Himalaya?
Time and place: Nov. 1, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:45 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
Abstract
This conversation brings together two anthropologists who have conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India for well over a decade. Mathur and Govindrajan will draw on their own research to discuss theoretical, methodological, political, and ethical issues related to the environmental humanities, specifically human-animal relationships, climate change, and religious ecology. They will also dwell upon what form the environmental humanities might take if considered from the place of the Indian Himalaya.
About the presenters
Nayanika Mathur
Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge, 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Indian Himalaya (Chicago, 2021) as well as co-editor of four collections including the recent The People of India: New India Politics in the 21st Century (Penguin 2022). She is currently writing on the changing form of the Indian state, as well as methodological challenges to the social sciences and humanities that have been opened out by the climate crisis.
Radhika Govindrajan
Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, published by University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019. She works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, anthropology of religion, agrarian studies, and feminist studies.
Communist Bodies and Capitalist Bodies: What Radiation Medicine Tells us about Cold War Understandings of Ecological Health
In the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion, a great divergence appeared between the medical opinions of the East and West on the long-term consequences on public health. In this keynote lecture, Kate Brown, Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives us insight on what these conflicting stories can tell us about how Western and Soviet scientists understood humans and the ecologies in which they lived.
Time and place: June 1, 2023 3:15 PM – 5:00 PM, Georg Sverdups hus, Auditorium 2
About the Lecture
In the years after the Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 exploded in April, 1986 in Soviet Ukraine, a great debate ensued over the damage to public health resulting from the accident's release of an estimated 50 to 200 million curies of radioactive contaminants. Health physicists from the West drew on the "gold standard" of radiation studies, the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivor Studies. Extrapolating from that large database, they concluded that Chernobyl emissions delivered doses to people in contaminated areas that were too small to cause any but a few thousand fatal cancers. Meanwhile, doctors and researchers in Ukraine and Belarus quietly carried out their own case-control studies and followed charts displaying the regular collection of public health data. They concluded in 1990 that they had a "public health disaster" on their hands. What caused the great divergence of these medical opinions? How did scientists in the East and West come to see radiation and exposure? Kate Brown worked in 27 archives across the Cold War divide to sort out the puzzle of Chernobyl and the conflicting stories of thriving nature zones or sickened "Chernobyl children" that the accident produced. Her conclusions point to a surprising disparity in the way Soviets and Western scientists understood humans and the ecologies in which they lived.
About the Presenter
Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into nine languages, won the silver medal for the Laura Shannon Prize, and the Reginald Zelnik and Marshall D. Shulman Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Manual for Survival was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award, and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.
About the workshop on Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia
This environmental humanities lecture is organized as part of the workshop Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia: New Perspectives in the Medical-Environmental Humanities and History.
The environmental humanities lecture is open to all, both participants in the workshop and the general public.
Organizer
Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), UiO:Life Science and KLIMER: Climate, environment and energy.
Why Singapore’s Monkeys Can’t Be Sacred: Law, Sovereignty, and the Agency of Animals in the Surveillance State - Environmental Humanities Lecture
In this talk, Stuart Earle Strange, assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, will explore the contradictions between law, sovereignty, animal agency, and the sacred in Singaporean wildlife conservation.
Time and place: May 12, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:45 PM, Seminar room 2, P. A. Munchs Hus
About the lecture
Singaporean wildlife conservationists say that the major threat to local animal life is the state. At the same time, they are continually lobbying the Singaporean state to expand its legal powers over wildlife. This talk explores this apparent contradiction to consider the relation between law, sovereignty, animal agency, and the sacred. How is contemporary conservation like religious practices of consecration (literally putting something aside or reserving it)? What does this reveal about the nature of sovereignty—who has the power to decide on which rules should be followed? And how do such practices relate to animal agency in human social life? By considering these issues together, the talk examines both the implications of continuities between conservation, law, and religion, but also just why non-human subjectivities are so critical—and vexing—in their conceptual entanglement.
About the presenter
Stuart Earle Strange is assistant professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (University of Toronto Press, 2021), and articles in journals that include Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Nothing about Antarctica without Antarctica - Environmental Humanities Lecture
In this talk, professor of philosophy, Alejandra Mancilla, asks who should be the political representatives in a place with no human inhabitants, namely, Antarctica. While the Antarctic Treaty has been celebrated as a successful legal instrument for the protection of the continent, some have criticized its elitist nature and demanded a more democratic system of governance. But, should only humans be part of this arrangement? Why not penguins and maybe icebergs too?
Time and place: May 3, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
About the lecture
The problem of “constituting” or “bounding” the demos has been much discussed in democratic theory, namely, how to determine who “the people” should be by some criterion that is not self-referential, i.e. that does not answer by referring back to “the people”. Not surprisingly, the debate so far has focused almost exclusively on nation-states and their policies of inclusion and exclusion. But, what about humanly uninhabited places? Who should the demos be in them?
In this talk, I suggest that Antarctica provides a unique opportunity for thinking about this question. After summarizing the current representation mechanisms at play in the Antarctic Treaty, I examine the main criticisms against them, interpreted through the lenses of democratic theory. I suggest that, while these criticisms should be taken seriously, they rely on methodological nationalism and methodological anthropocentrism, and should therefore be questioned.
Getting inspiration from the Protocol for Environmental Protection, I consider the possibility that the Antarctic demos ought not only to include humans, but also nonhuman beings and maybe also other natural entities, living or not. I examine how this extension in the membership of the political community should be reflected in the way it is represented, and the challenges this raises.
I conclude, tentatively, that the Antarctic demos should be an ecumenical congregation, composed of human and nonhuman beings in and beyond Antarctica. Ideally, I suggest, this should also be the case in other places, beyond Antarctica. That for practical reasons we see this as an unfeasible goal should not prevent us from aiming at it as a heuristic ideal.
About the presenter
Alejandra Mancilla is professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo.
She works on global justice, human rights, territorial rights, animal and environmental ethics. Currently, she leads the five-year project “Dynamic Territory”, aimed at rethinking territorial governance in times of climatic, geographic, and demographic change. She is the author of The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). Her work has been published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Ethics and International Affairs, Grotiana, The Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Polar Record, among others.
Whales as anthropological subject in Arctic Norway. A conversation - Environmental Humanities Lecture
The whale is held to have great symbolic meaning, as an environmental emblem, as food, as tourist attraction, and more. In Andenes, Vesterålen, two anthropologists, Britt Kramvig and Sadie Hale talk about their search for different kinds of whales and the particular ways that the whale-as-symbol is contested in this place.
Time and place: Mar. 1, 2023 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
About the Lecture
The whale is held to have great symbolic meaning, as an environmental emblem, as food, as tourist attraction, and more (Kalland 2009; Kramvig, Kristoffersen & Førde 2016). As such, the whale can be said to be multiple, acquiring different meanings in different contexts. And yet, it is also essentially unknowable—an ocean-dwelling mammal of huge proportions and a set of sensory apparatus humans can only begin to imagine. This makes the whale an ethnographically “slippery” subject. In this talk, we focus on whales through the case study of Andenes, a small town in the Arctic archipelago of Vesterålen where whale tourism is a major attraction. Drawing on past and future fieldwork in Andenes, we discuss our respective searches for whales found and not found, and the particular ways that the whale-as-symbol is contested in this place.
About the Presenters
Sadie Hale is a first-year PhD research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her interdisciplinary research explores temporalities of human-whale relations in Arctic Norway and the Azores, Portugal, as part of the SEATIMES project. Previously, she has studied the hunting of basking sharks and Greenland sharks in the North Atlantic, resulting in the artistic co-production Cairban (2021-2023). She is on Twitter @_sadiesaid.
Britt Kramvig is Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She has an interdisciplinary orientation and practices collaborative methodologies in all of her research. She is an expert on Indigenous ontologies, ecologies, aesthetics and storytelling. In addition, she works with tourism as a world making practice and researches how sustainability is performed locally. Ongoing publication efforts engage with everyday practices of reconciliation, memory and landscape – through research in the archive of the Sámi medical expert Knut Lunde. She co-edited the book Recognition, Reconciliation and Restoration: Applying a Postcolonial Understanding in Social Work and Healing (2020), among many other publications. She is also a fellow at the University of Durham connected to the project Exploring Arctic Soundscape and a member of the ongoing research project Mediating Arctic Geographies.
Children, cars, and climate change: an environmental history of playgrounds - Environmental Humanities Lecture
In this talk, professor of cultural studies, Ben Highmore explores the role of playgrounds in equipping the young with skills to face a climate catastrophe. How should we understand the history of playgrounds? What is their relationship to their environments and the environment, and what role could they play in the current climate emergency?
Time and place: Feb. 8, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
About the lecture
The history of the modern playground witnesses diverse and overlapping forces from the nineteenth century: a child saving movement to improve the conditions of the urban poor; a form of muscular Christianity to promote civil behaviour; a eugenic attempt to shape health and wellbeing in adults as well as children; and a desire to provide child-centred space away from the dangers of traffic, crime, and commercial culture.
In this talk I will concentrate on a range of playground experiments that took place in Britain and elsewhere after 1945, often in the wake of massive increases in child fatalities from road accidents. Adventure playgrounds and city farms took elements from the nineteenth-century playground movements and married them with progressive education, democratic politics, and a desire to reconnect the city with nature (in all its problematic senses). Informed by ‘environmental biology’ as well as by an emergent anarchism these play spaces offered a place for children to cultivate the earth, to tend animals, to build, and to create, in the name of social autonomy. These recent histories offer, I think, practical plans for the urgent issue of how we start to equip the young with the skills to face a climate catastrophe.
About the presenter
Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex. His most recent book is Lifestyle revolution: How taste changed class in late twentieth century Britain (2023). Previous books include The art of brutalism: Rescuing hope from catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017) and Cultural feelings: Mood, mediation, and cultural politics (2017). He is currently finishing a book on the recent history of playgrounds for Reaktion.
2022
"Did we Save the Earth at Stockholm?" Design Activism at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment - Environmental Humanities Lecture
In this talk, professor of design history Dr. Kjetil Fallan, explores design interventions at, and in the wake of, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm 1972. What can design activism tell us about the conference's influence on future political decision-making? Or about the development of environmental thinking and ecologically informed design ideology in Scandinavia?
Time and place: Nov. 2, 2022 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
About the lecture
Screenprint made by Åke Carlsson titled "Miljövårdskonferens – en rökridå" which tranlsates to "Environmental conference - a smokescreen". Read more about the poster here (page in swedish).
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment organized in Stockholm in June 1972 is widely considered a landmark in both political and popular attention to environmental issues. Nevertheless, the legacy of the UN conference is contested, as the heavily publicized mega-event made it abundantly clear that saving the world by committee would be a protracted undertaking riddled with conflicting interests, power biases and compromises. This became apparent to local activists already during and in the lead-up to the conference, sparking a spate of unsanctioned activities in response to the official program. This talk will explore design interventions at, and in the wake of, the UN Conference on the Human Environment, focusing on the environmental-political activism of design students and the design practices of the broader activist movements and events. Taking a closer look at posters, demonstrations, services, and exhibitions, I will argue that design and designers were absolutely integral to the many acts and artifacts of environmental activism produced in response to the UN conference. Looking beyond the official proceedings and instead focusing on this kind of unsanctioned design activism allows us to see that the conference wielded considerable influence on not only on future political decision-making, but also on the development of environmental thinking and ecologically informed design ideology in Scandinavia.
About the presenter
Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo, and a Working Group member of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. His most recent books are Ecological by Design: A History from Scandinavia (MIT Press, 2022); Nordic Design Cultures in Transformation, 1960-1980: Revolt and Resilience (Routledge, 2022); and The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (Routledge, 2019)
Paradigm Shifts for a Planetary Emergency: Towards an Anthropocenography for urban coastal research at False Bay, Cape Town, South Africa - Environmental Humanities Lecture
In this talk, Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Lesley Green, will draw on current Anthropocene scholarship in the environmental humanities and social sciences to suggest four approaches to strengthening trans-disciplinarity engagement between social and natural sciences.
Time and place: Oct. 20, 2022 3:15 PM – 5:00 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
About the presentation
Reflecting on a recent three-decade review of the social-ecological sciences of False Bay in Cape Town that was co-authored by 32 South African-based scientists, this essay draws on current Anthropocene scholarship in the environmental humanities and social sciences to suggest four approaches to strengthening trans-disciplinarity engagement between social and natural sciences.
First, the material flows between the fields categorised as "nature" and "society" is suggested as an alternative empirical base for integrative transdisciplinary research, building on emergent transdisciplinary fields including industrial ecology, biogeochemical sciences, circular economics and critical zone scholarship.
Second, a humanities-informed conversation in South African scholarship invites discussion as to whether and how the conceptual categories of nature and society remain empirically useful, given the evidence in Anthropocene stratigraphy that human living is terra-forming. Third, humanities scholarship is vital for the scholarly assessment of historical and contemporary datasets and scientific publications. Fourth, the theorisation of "social systems", "the human", "society", and "eco-system services" in the social-ecological approaches represented in the review, create a barrier for social scientists to take up invitations to transdisciplinary research partnerships.
The above concerns, taken together, frame an alternative approach to transdisciplinary research that is tentatively suggested as an "anthropocenography": a research paradigm based on material flows in the Anthropocene.
While this critique has focused on the review of research on a single bay offered by a cohort of 32 natural scientists, the invitation to contemporary social scientists in South Africa is implicit, and urgent. Both "calling in" and "calling out" are transformational tools. Our work warrants more than a default to the exposé, if we are to build generative engagements with allies in the natural sciences with whom we dissent.
Simultaneously, the invitation to natural scientists is to engage deeply with emerging environmental social sciences and humanities literatures in pursuit of habitability amid the planetary challenges that are already with us - and those to come.
About the presenter
Lesley Green is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. She was recently a Cheney Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, working to build stronger social science and humanities engagement with earth and life sciences.
This lecture is supported by the INTPART project Strengthening Environmental Anthropology Research and Education Through Interdisciplinary Methods and Collaborations.
Soils and Fungi: Thinking and Being with Mycelial Relations - Environmental Humanities Lecture
How has our understandings of relations between soil, plants, and fungi have changed over time? In this lecture, professor of anthropology Dr. Michael J. Hathaway will explore the role of fungal mycelium in engaging the soil matrix.
Time and place: Oct. 13, 2022 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
About the lecture
In today’s talk, I will explore the role of fungal mycelium in engaging the soil matrix. While I will introduce some empirical material, I also apply my training in anthropology and the environmental humanities to look critically at the production of scientific knowledge, showing how our understandings of relations between soil, plants, and fungi have changed over time. In this talk I also consider how soil is a complex matrix that exists in dynamic movement, working as substrate as well as source of food and water for fungal and botanical livelihoods.
This Environmental Humanities lecture is organized by the Anthropogenic Soils collaboratory.
About the presenter
Dr. Michael J. Hathaway is a Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, where he is also an Associate Member of the School for International Studies, and the Director of SFU's David Lam Centre for Asian Studies. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, he has been working with Indigenous peoples in Southwest China and Japan for over a quarter century. His recent book, What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022), initiates a project to challenge some of the deeply-rooted assumptions of human exceptionalism and human supremacy that have guided Western understandings of the natural world.
Recomposed: Music Climate Crisis Change - Environmental Humanities Lecture
The environment is having a massive impact on music, changing what music is and how it comes to be, not just what it is about or how it sounds. In this lecture, Dr. Kyle Devine, professor of musicology at UiO, presents the nuances in this Great Recomposition, and the importance of overriding our defaults.
Time and place: Oct. 5, 2022 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
About the presentation
Everywhere you look, the musical world is changing—overhauling itself in response to climate crisis. There are records made of plants and stereos that run on sunshine. Musicians, bands, and entire genres have committed to sustainable touring. We have industry-specific carbon calculators, emissions audits, and climate credentials. A variety of organizations now size up (and draw down) the environmental impact of music on all levels. And there is a lot of eco-awareness: white papers, grey literature, green roadmaps, yellow pages, university courses, podcasts, and more. We are witnessing a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be, not just what it is about or how it sounds. Call it the Great Recomposition.
The Great Recomposition probably seems like a Good Thing. It is. And it isn’t. This presentation explains how both things can be true at the same time. Drawing on research with the people driving music’s large-scale climate action—dozens of them, at all levels, from around the world—I argue that music’s large-scale climate action is necessary and welcome, on the one hand, but also constrained and limited, on the other. My bet is that we can most clearly see what is good about the Recomposition—as well as where its limitations lie and what else might be possible—if we learn to override some of our default settings on climate issues.
About the presenter
Dr. Kyle Devine works in the Department of Musicology and the School of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo. His books include Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music and Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media.
The Virosphere: Learning to Live With the Unknown
In this lecture, the Medical Humanities and the Environmental Humanities meet. Associate Professor Eben Kirksey from the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia, will introduce us to the "virosphere".
Time and place: June 13, 2022 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Linken, Georg Sverdrups hus
Viruses often inspire fear. The history of virology has been driven by anxiety about disease and death. But, new research suggests that most viruses are benign, mutualistic, or symbiotic. Scholars in medical anthropology and the environmental humanities have an opportunity to engage with the virosphere--the totality of viral biodiversity which swirls around us in an unseen and largely unknown realm. Since cloudy epistemologies and ontologies structure our current relationship with the virosphere, perhaps it is easy to be afraid of forces that we can barely understand. Ecological interactions with mind-boggling complexity could suddenly shift, destroying out life support systems. The unruly realm of viral biodiversity could generate a new pandemic at any moment. But, what if we instead approached the virosphere with curiosity and wonder. Is it possible to empathize with a virus?
About the presenter
Eben Kirksey is an American anthropologist who specializes on science and justice. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, hosted Kirksey for the 2019-2020 academic year, where he finished his latest book: The Mutant Project.
About the event
The event is organized by Ursula Münster (Director at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities) and Daniel Münster (Associate Professor at the Department of Community Medicine and Global Health).
2021
Promised World, Earthly Hearings: Liberal Imaginaries, Sustainable Development, and Fugitive Democracy
What happens when people bring their environmental complaints to a body gathered in the name of the world? In this lecture Dr. Cheryl Lousley, professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University, Canada, discusses the World Commission on Environment and Development's public hearings.
Time and place: Dec. 9, 2021 4:00 PM–5:30 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.
Sharing research on the public hearing and testimony archives of the World Commission on Environment and Development, whose 1987 report Our Common Future launched sustainable development, this talk attends to fugitive politics and sticky materialities at dramatic scenes where bursts of political-ecological struggle and desire were provisionally gathered around the promise and procedures of liberal internationalism. At the hearings, fugitive claims to the resources and potency of the world exposed fractures in the commission’s liberal imaginary and exceeded what could or would be contained by the idea of sustainable development. Their political and historical significance lies in this excess: in the democratic audacity to make claims on the institutions through which ecological conditions for living a good life were to be managed and distributed.
About the presenter
Dr. Cheryl Lousley, Associate Professor in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University (Canada), works on contemporary environmental justice writing and cultural studies. Her essays appears in the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, and Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, among other places. Her latest essay appears in a special "Neoliberal Environments" issue of Studies in Canadian Literature. Dr. Lousley has held a Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an Environmental Humanities Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, and a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich. She is past president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada and the founding series editor of the Environmental Humanities book series, published with Wilfrid Laurier University Press since 2007.
HYBRID: Do Whales Judge Us: Interspecies History and Ethics with Dr. Bathsheba R. Demuth
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. This talk by Dr. Bathsheba R. Demuth, explores how each of these groups imagined different normative relationships with whales and how these ideas shaped interactions between human hunters and whales, and the whales’ own adaptions.
Time and place: Nov. 11, 2021 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - Physical at Henrik Wergelands hus 210; digitally on Zoom
About the speaker
Dr. Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. For over two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, she has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in the how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.
About the collaboratory
The Fluid Dynamics collaboratory explores the unique making, unmaking, and fluctuation of boundaries in marine spaces. Inspired by case studies such as marine sovereignty claims based on albatross excrement deposits, the territorial range changes of arctic seals with sea ice break up, and the impacts of sea level rise on small island states we will examine the history of marine territorialization and place-making from a diverse set of perspectives to ask a question about the present-future: what is happening to fluid marine boundaries as the global ocean ecosystem destabilizes?
WEBINAR: Capturing life and loss in multispecies relationships: Reflections on filming practices
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.
Time and place: Nov. 4, 2021 10:15 AM–11:30 AM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom
“Get the camera to see!” said Asgeir when we first started working together. What might that mean? In this talk, we draw on three of our documentary projects on climate change and biodiversity loss to discuss how filming may convey the complex relationships that such processes provoke and threaten. Our reflections draw on the insights and challenges emerging from recent ecocinema studies that foreground affect and emotion as inherently embodied, socially and culturally situated responses that enable agencing, correspondence with and answering to the world. We will show excerpts from our previous and ongoing work and invite to a conversation on curiosity, passion and care for multispecies relations. Here, we would like to explore filmmaking and photographing as “practiced forms of careful attention to the ways of life of other species,” in the words of Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirskey and Ursula Münster (2016), as well as what is enacted within us either as filmmakers or researchers when constantly reckoning with love and loss.
Bios:
Asgeir Helgestad is a multi-award winning nature filmmaker and founder of the independent film production company Artic Light based in Norway. His passion and love for wildlife is the driving force behind his work, and his narratives draw on a deep connection with nature. Helgestad´s latest film, “Queen without Land” (2018), explores climate crisis on Svalbard through the intimate encounter with a polar bear mother struggling to survive in a collapsing ecosystem. He now works with two new film projects focusing on climate and nature crisis on Svalbard and mainland Norway.
Ageliki Lefkaditou is a nature documentary producer, historian of science and an award-winning science curator. She envisions to work at the intersection of filmmaking, environmental and social justice activism, and critical humanities. Lefkaditou completed her first PhD on philosophy of ecology – with an emphasis on modeling strategies and the holism reductionism debate – in Greece. In her second PhD, at the University of Leeds, she looks at the history of racial anthropology. Her recent research focuses on the history and contemporary aspects of race science, including nationalism and colonialism. She will soon embark on a research project at the University of Oslo examining the history of intelligence testing.
WEBINAR: Zoo-futurism: A philosophical and artistic exploration of ego-ecologies
How may we grasp meaning beyond the boundaries of biological species? In this talk philosopher Dr. Dominique Lestel, will explore ‘zoo-futurism’ as setting up the basis of an ego-ecology – to incarnate and to feel biodiversity not from the point of view of the first person, but from the point of view of a first person; to feel its richness and importance from a personal point of view.
Time and place: June 18, 2021 10:00 AM–11:30 AM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom
WEBINAR: Webs of Meaning Revisited; Conservation, Cultivation and Dispossession in the North
How might attention to worlds of meaning extend beyond the human, and how may this matter for conservation? In this lecture, Dr. Marianne Lien, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, explores how worlds, such as specific landscapes, are sustained through reciprocal and ongoing practices and affordances.
Time and place: May 20, 2021 10:00 AM–11:00 AM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom
Zoo-futurism is a philosophical and artistic perspective that opens the path of a kind of “species anarchism”. It finds its legitimacy partly in the fact that the notion of species is conceptually not so clear in biology and that it is not so simple to rigorously draw convincing frontiers between species. Therefore: why stay in one’s own species? Yearning to go and explore other species (a recurring yearning in the History of Humanity that is anchored within a phylogenetic tendency that is already mobilized by many nonhuman species) is not only a legitimate desire but one that many emerging technologies could allow us to satisfy more and more (Lestel, 2020). To go and explore the giraffe or to go and visit the sea crab has to be thought not as a sterile fantasy but as an existential program that has to be taken (almost) literally. Such a program is of great complexity and has many stakes. In my short talk, I’ll restrain myself to the ecological dimension of such a program. Indeed, Zoo-futurism sets up the basis of an ego-ecology – to incarnate and to feel biodiversity not from the point of view of the first person, but from the point of view of a first person; to feel its richness and importance from a personal point of view.
In the early 1970’s the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously wrote that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’. His concern with cultural meaning shaped anthropology for decades to come, but largely ignored that spinning is a more-than-human practice, involving not only women, but other-than-human animals too. I take this invitation as an opportunity to explore how attention to meaning might extend beyond the human, and how this matters for conservation. I am particularly interested in how worlds, such as specific landscapes, are sustained through reciprocal and ongoing practices and affordances, as captured by the Sámi word meahcci. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Finnmark North-Norway, I describe how cultivating people and cultivating land went hand in hand as part of the colonizing efforts of the Norwegian nation state. In this context, questions of conservation quickly become questions of dispossession, while ‘webs of significance’ are fragmented, multilayered and steeped in colonial legacies.
Bio
Marianne Lien is professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. She did her first fieldwork on eating habits in Finnmark, North Norway in the 1980’s, and has now returned to the region with a focus on domestication, colonization, reindeer herding and agricultural cultivation. Her interest in domestication was sparked by her research on farmed salmon, and she has done fieldwork on aquaculture in Tasmania and in Norway. Lien is inspired by STS, and has explored the interface of STS and anthropology with John Law and Marisol de la Cadena. She has been the director of a research group at the Center for Advanced Study in Oslo, called ‘Arctic Domestication in the era of the Anthropocene’. Her recent books include Domestication gone wild; Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations, co-edited with Heather Swanson and Gro Ween (Duke University Press 2018), and Becoming Salmon, Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish (University California Press 2015).
Bio:
Dr. Dominique Lestel teaches contemporary philosophy at Ecole normale supérieure de Paris. In 2017, he was awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship, and in 2018-2019 he was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He has published many papers in international journals and his last two books are: Nous sommes les autres animaux (2019, Fayard) and Machines Insurrectionnelles. Une théorie postbiologique du vivant (2021, Fayard).
2020
WEBINAR: Erich Hörl: Where There is No World and No Epoch: Bernard Stiegler's Thinking of the Entropocene
In this lecture, Dr. Erich Hörl, University of Leuphana, Lüneburg, discusses Bernard Stiegler's reflections on the time of suspension or "being-in-disruption" that define life in the Entropocene, understood as an un-time without world or epoch.
This event is co-organised with The Seminar of Aesthetics.
Time and place: Dec. 10, 2020 2:00 PM–3:30 PM, On Zoom
The lecture outlines the thinking of suspension that characterizes the work of the Bernard Stiegler, who died earlier this year. On the one hand, it lays out the problem of the “objective epokhé [epokhé objective]” and of “epokhal doubling [redoublement épokhal]” Stiegler develops as part of a phenomenology of disorientation. On this basis, on the other hand, it presents Stiegler’s reflections on being-in-disruption that define our present, the Entropocene, as an un-time without world or epoch. The core thesis of the talk is that what is breaking through in Stiegler’s thinking of suspension is a new sense of sense, a trans-formative sense that, given the urgent new “Great Transformation” of which we have seen merely the beginning, may be of great philosophical and political relevance.
About Erich Hörl
Erich Hörl is a philosopher and a professor of media studies at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media of the University of Leuphana (Lüneburg, Germany). A student of Friedrich Kittler, he is specialist on Gilbert Simondon and the history of cybernetics. He works on the question of the “technological condition” of man, and on the development of a new ecological paradigm, challenging the conceptual, political and institutional consequences of contemporary media theory.
Recent publications include General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm (Bloomsbury, 2017), Sacred Channels. The Archaic Illusion of Communication (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). “Variations on Klee’s Cosmographic Method,” in Grain, Vapor, Ray. Textures of the Anthropocene, Vol. III, eds Katrin Klingan et. al. (MIT Press, 2015), “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology,” in The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside, eds. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke (Sternberg Press, 2013), and “The Technological Condition,” in Parrhesia: Journal of Critical Philosophy (Issue 22, 2015). He is also the contributing editor of Die technologische Bedingung, (Suhrkamp, 2011).
WEBINAR: The Mutant Project: Posthuman Possibilities. Environmental Humanities Lecture.'
In this talk, anthropologist Dr. Eben Kirksey, Associate Professor at Deakin University, Melbourne, visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species?
Time and place: Oct. 22, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Register for webinar on Zoom
"That rare kind of scholarship that is also a page-turner."
—Britt Wray, author of Rise of the Necrofauna
At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had created the first genetically modified babies—twin girls named Lulu and Nana—sending shockwaves around the world. A year later, a Chinese court sentenced Dr. He to three years in prison for "illegal medical practice."
As scientists elsewhere start to catch up with China’s vast genetic research program, gene editing is fueling an innovation economy that threatens to widen racial and economic inequality. Fundamental questions about science, health, and social justice are at stake: Who gets access to gene editing technologies? As countries loosen regulations around the globe, from the U.S. to Indonesia, can we shape research agendas to promote an ethical and fair society?
Eben Kirksey takes us on a groundbreaking journey to meet the key scientists, lobbyists, and entrepreneurs who are bringing cutting-edge genetic engineering tools like CRISPR to your local clinic. He also ventures beyond the scientific echo chamber, talking to disabled scholars, doctors, hackers, chronically-ill patients, and activists who have alternative visions of a genetically modified future for humanity.
The Mutant Project empowers us to ask the right questions, uncover the truth, and navigate this brave new world.
About Eben Kirksey
In academic settings, Eben is perhaps best known for his work on multispecies ethnography—a field that uses innovative approaches to study human interactions with animals, microbes, fungi, and plants. His teaching repertoire includes popular lecture courses like “Environment, Development, and Sustainability”, as well as advanced seminars on “Human Nature.” His interdisciplinary offerings include “Environmental Art,” “Medical Anthropology,” as well as “Science and Society. Currently Eben supervises four PhD students at Deakin University and holds a major Discovery Project grant to study the Promise of Multispecies Justice.
WEBINAR: Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Environmental Humanities Lecture
How does attention to and stewardship of soils point to alternative frameworks for living and dying? Kristina Lyons, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, explores the way life strives to flourish in the face of violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.
Time and place: Oct. 8, 2020 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Register for webinar in Zoom
In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests and grow non-illicit crops. In Vital Decomposition Kristina M. Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations. She follows state soil scientists and small farmers across labs, greenhouses, forests, and farms and attends to the struggles and collaborations between campesinos, agrarian movements, state officials, and scientists over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, and sustainability in Colombia. In particular, Lyons examines the practices and philosophies of rural farmers who value the decomposing layers of leaves, which make the soils that sustain life in the Amazon, and shows how the study and stewardship of the soil point to alternative frameworks for living and dying. In outlining the life-making processes that compose and decompose into soil, Lyons theorizes how life can thrive in the face of the violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.
Bio
Kristina Lyons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, University of Pennsylvania. She also holds affiliations with the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at UPenn. Kristina’s current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, transitional justice, community-based forms of reconciliation, and science studies in Colombia.
Discussant:
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK.
WEBINAR: Military Snails: Conservation and Colonization in Hawai‘i. Environmental Humanities Lecture
What happens when actors with different interests claims access to the same natural and cultural site? OSEH professor II Thom van Dooren explores some of the complexities of conservation in the context of deep histories and ongoing realities of colonization and militarization.
Time and place: Aug. 13, 2020 10:00 AM–11:00 AM, Register for webinar in Zoom
Mākua Valley on the island of O‘ahu is a place in which snail conservation, the US Army, and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) claims to access land and cultural sites are brought into dynamic tension. Over roughly the past 100 years, the Army have used this valley for live-fire and other exercises, excluding people while also blowing up and burning the habitat of critically endangered land snails and other species. Snails and local people are drawn together here into a powerful multispecies solidarity centered on efforts to conserve the biological and cultural heritage of this place. Importantly, these efforts have also rippled out beyond the valley, through the Army’s subsequent investment in snail conservation in Hawai'i, but also through its ongoing activities in other parts of the Pacific region that continue to threaten snails and their peoples, while also fostering their own dynamic forms of solidarity and resistance.
This lecture will explore some of the complexities and compromises of conservation in the context of deep histories and ongoing realities of both colonization and militarization.
Thom van Dooren
Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, and Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of Oslo. His research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (2019), and co-editor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), all published by Columbia University Press. www.thomvandooren.org
Competing Knowledges about the Environment. Environmental Humanities Lecture
How to address the double bind between growth and sustainability? In this talk, anthropologist Dr. Thomas Hylland Eriksen engages with the climate crisis in Queensland, Australia. He asks how different knowledge regimes identify and interpret facts differently, and how this creates conflicting depictions of the world and solutions to humanity's problems.
Time and place: Feb. 20, 2020 3:15 PM–4:45 PM, 2531 Stort møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus
Abstract
In Gladstone, Central Queensland, even the sunset is sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. To watch the sun setting in the west, you must also simultaneously stare at the three tall, symmetrical columns of Gladstone Power Station. The largest in Queensland, the power station feeds on black coal from the interior of the state and, doubtless by coincidence, it was placed in the exact spot where the sun sets.
Gladstone is the undisputed industrial hub of the region. A stagnant billabong for decades, the city has since the 1960s increasingly placed itself at the epicentre of contemporary industrialism, with its large-scale electricity production, alumina refineries, aluminium smelter, cement factory and expanding coal port. At the same time, it is located just inside the severely damaged Great Barrier Reef, a symbol of the effects of anthropogenic climate change, a canary in the coalmine.
In my research, a main topic was the double bind between growth and sustainability as a fundamental contradiction of the present era. I studied this dilemma through an analysis of the conflicting knowledge regimes depicting the world, and the solution to humanity's problems, in very different ways.
During fieldwork in Gladstone, I was sometimes asked who paid for my research. Had I responded that it was funded by a mining company, or the powerful Ports Corporation, I would have lost credibility in their eyes. Some of my informants even pointed out that although they still trusted science, they no longer trusted scientists. Most of the local conflicts in Gladstone concern the relationship between residents and powerful economic agents.
In the era of ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ and widespread revolt against the elites (including the intellectual elites), the Australian material speaks to wider issues including the validity of truth claims and the basic relationship between knowledge and power. My examples focus mainly on the destructive side-effects of industrialisation, and the lecture shows how people representing different knowledge regimes identify and interpret facts differently.
A broader explanatatory framework may take into account the acceleration and intensification of global processes, which has led to “overheating” across the world, in the sense that change now takes place faster and with more wide-ranging consequences than before. Changes are often interpreted through the decentralised electronic media, and as a result, it is increasingly difficult to navigate the jungle of information and to know whose knowledge to trust and to act upon. In confronting climate change, understanding the relationship between knowledge and agency is a matter of greater priority now than getting the scientific facts right: This knowledge has been available for a long time without palpable effects in politics or everyday life, and therefore a focus on the knowledge production itself and its relationship to experience and agency should be high on the research agenda.
About the lecturer
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. His research in Australia has been published in articles and book chapters and notably in the monograph Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (London: Pluto 2018).
2019
Toxic Bios: Dismantling the Toxic Narratives of the Anthropocene. Environmental Humanities Lecture
How does the Anthropocene manifest in the organosphere? Dr. Marco Armiero presents the Guerrilla Narrative project Toxic Bios, a counter-hegemonic exercise aiming to dismantle the Toxic Narratives of the Anthropocene while prefiguring alternative socio-ecological politics.
Time and place: Oct. 31, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, 12 etg. P. A. Munchs Hus
Abstract
Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all of them in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment?
Strata of toxics have sedimented into the human (and more than human) body, arriving, according to the most recent studies in epigenetics, to be inscribed into the genetic memory. Perhaps, looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene, the Age of Waste. One might say that the Wasteocene is the true face of the neutral and universal Anthropocene because it reveals the unequal relationships and violence inscribed in the making of the new era. The Wasteocene is about the production of wasted people and places rather than about the production of waste per se. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities implies the construction of a toxic ecology made of contaminating substances and narratives. Necrocapitalist wasting relationships are so pervasive because they come together with a hegemonic narrative which does not even allow to see the contamination or speak about it.
But while official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narratives has been written in flesh, blood, and cells. The body becomes the archive of stories without a history, where clues are embedded under the skin. Those bodily stories are connected beyond the individual body, linking humans and more-than-humans in one toxic narrative. As a sophisticated portable device, the body registers what remains invisible in the making of the Wasteocene, but as with every narrative, this bodily one does not only compile symptoms and tropes but it also has a performative character.
The lecture is hosted by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and is open for all.
Place by Design: Industry, Colony and Environmental Disobedience. Environmental Humanities Lecture
How is knowledge produced from art, pedagogy and civic engagement in the Environmental Humanities? Dr. Hanna Musiol lectures on the need to create spaces for participatory and transmedia collaborations among scholars, artists, students, designers, and community actors.
Time and place: Oct. 3, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, 2531 Stort Møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus.
What are the biosocial environmental conditions under which environmental humanities work—research, art, pedagogy, civic engagement—comes into being in the academic knowledge factory, in our culture industry? What is the role of the humanities and art in the legitimization of “prospective” environmental research at the moment of Nordic high extractivism?
Using examples from NTNU ARTEC environmental art projects and initiatives—Current and Resist as Forest public interventions in the Trondheim interactive cyberpark, — Musiol will talk about the need to create models of and spaces for participatory and transmedia collaborations among scholars, artists, students, designers, and community actors.
The lecture is hosted by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and is open for all.
About the lecturer
Hanna Musiol is Associate Professor of English and a core member of NTNU ARTEC at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include transnational American literature, transmedia storytelling, cultural studies, theory, and critical pedagogy, with emphasis on migration, human rights, and political ecology. She publishes frequently on literary and visual aesthetics and justice, including environmental justice.
Her work has appeared in Journal of American Studies, College Literature, Journal of Labor and Society, Oil Culture, Human Rights and Literature, Discursive Framing of Human Rights, and Writing Beyond the State, and she also associate-edited Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Musiol was the creator of the (Im)Migrant Experience Initiative (IEI), a digital archive of narratives of migration and displacement at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and she has organized numerous curatorial, public humanities, and global classroom initiatives across Europe and the US (Futurescapes, Just Fiction, Spectral Landscapes, and, most recently, Mobilized Humanities, Art, Technology).
The Undisciplined Environmental Humanities. Guest lecture by Martin Hultman
Society urgently request knowledge from the environmental humanities that can help us understand the challenges of our times. This talk presents some examples of co-creation between academia and civil society, exploring collaborative attempts to make a difference.
Time and place: Oct. 2, 2019 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, PAM 489
Funding bodies, journalists and civil society urgently request knowledge from the environmental humanities that can help us understand the challenges of our times. Concepts and practices such as "rights of nature," "ecological masculinities" or "ecopreneurship" seem to be vehicles for change, appreciated by society at large—but is this enough? This talk presents some examples of co-creation between academia and civil society, exploring collaborative attempts to make a difference and to stop, or at least limit, the ongoing ecocide—and opening up a discussion about how to keep expanding the possible influence of our matters of concern.
The lecture is hosted by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and is open for all.
About the lecturer
Martin Hultman is Associate Professor at Chalmers University, Gothenburg. He has published widely on issues of energy, climate and the environment, including the books "Discourses of Global Climate Change", "Ecological Masculinities" and "Naturens rättigheter" (Swedish). Hultman is currently leading three long-term research groups that analyze, respectively, masculinities and energy, ecopreneurship in circular economies and climate change denial.