Other events

2023

Environmental diversity now!

Join us for our final OSEH event where we explore issues of race, ethnicity, and gender, but also diverse ways of opening up environmental problems and possibilities in the academy and beyond. We are joined by acclaimed poet and nature writer Camille Dungy and prominent scholars in the environmental humanities, and there will be upcycled music, celebration and food.

Time and place: Oct. 13, 2023 4:00 PM – 11:00 PM, SALT

How can we cultivate more diversity within the environmental humanities? Questions about diversity in many forms will be the focus of this exciting event, exploring issues related not only to race, ethnicity, and gender, but also diverse ways of opening up environmental problems and possibilities in the academy and beyond.

Featured speakers and performances will be grounded in diverse kinds of “soil”: from gardens and nature writing to environmental humanities programs and upcycled music.

Come join us to celebrate 5 years of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) and important new grounds to be explored!

Organizing Committee

Kyle Devine
Pierre du Plessis
Kjetil Fallan
Michael Lundblad

Program

16:00 Doors open
16:45 Welcome and Introductions
- Ursula Münster, Associate Professor of the Environmental Humanities and Director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH)
- Michael Lundblad, Professor of English-Language Literature (University of Oslo)
17:00 - 18:00 KEYNOTE: How poetry and nature writing can cultivate productive cultural and environmental diversity
- Camille Dungy, University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, acclaimed poet and nature writer, and author most recently of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
18:15 - 19:45 ROUND TABLE: Cultivating New Grounds in the Environmental Humanities
- Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society/ LMU Munich), Heather Swanson (Aarhus University), Rahul Ranjan (OsloMet University), and Liisa-Rávná Finbog (Tampere University)
- Moderated by Ursula Münster
19:45 CLOSING REMARKS
- Mette Halskov Hansen, Vice-Rector for Climate & the Environment and Cross-Disciplinarity, UiO
20:00 MUSICAL INTERVENTION, FOOD AND CELEBRATION: Ane Bjerkan and Mari Lesteberg - “upcycled rhythmic background vibe music”

About Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.

A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations.

Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Mending Firescapes: Restoring the role of fire for nature and culture

Land holds an “ecological memory”, the patterns in the landscape that are maintained by creative fires. This seminar will discuss the importance and challenges of using fire to shape landscapes in Australia, Italy and Norway.

Time and place: Sep. 14, 2023 2:15 PM – 5:00 PM, Seminarrom 2, P.A. Munch Hus / Zoom

Just like our collective memory of traditional knowledge fades when we support ourselves by burning oil instead of using fire as a tool for biodiversity, the land’s ecological memory eventually fades and its patterns become more difficult to find.

Mending landscapes means uncovering both the ecological memory of and our historic connection to the land. This seminar will discuss the importance and challenges of using fire to shape landscapes in Australia, Italy and Norway.

Please register by September 14th for physical or digital attendance.

About the event

Heraclitus understood fire to be the first element, its creative power giving rise to water, earth and air.

Flames have in fact formed both humans and ecosystems. Plants have evolved in tandem with the emergence of wildfires to the extent that these plants – and the animals that eat them – are called “fire followers”.

For millennia humans have used fire as a paintbrush on the landscape, creating meadows for elk or thinning brush to prevent uncontrollable wildfires (Kimmerer 2013). Today, there exists a cultural aversion to fire in the landscape (Bowman et al. 2009). Modern land management practices aim to suppress fires and the assumed destruction they bring. Instead, fire regimes are necessary disturbances contributing to biodiversity, and protect landscapes against uncontrollable wildfires.

Land holds an “ecological memory”, the patterns in the landscape that are maintained by creative fires (Peterson 2002). Just like our collective memory of traditional knowledge fades when we support ourselves by burning oil instead of using fire as a tool for biodiversity, the land’s ecological memory eventually fades and its patterns become more difficult to find.

Mending landscapes means uncovering both the ecological memory of and our historic connection to the land.

This seminar will discuss the importance and challenges of using fire to shape landscapes in Australia, Italy and Norway.

Program

14:15 Karen V. Lykke: Welcome and introduction
14:25 Andrew Mathews: Recovering fire in the Italian Apennines: Silence, stigma, and memory
14:50 Janike Larsen: Tinkering with fire: Mending reindeer grazing pastures in Finnmark
15:15 Coffee break
15:30 Jon Rasmus Nyquist: Fire regimes and what it means to reinstate them: Lessons from Australia
15:55 Panel Discussion led by Elin Wyller
16:30 Q&A

Presentation Abstracts (in order of program)

Recovering Fire in the Italian Apennines: Silence, Stigma, and Memory, by Andrew Mathews

Apennine mountain pastures in Italy, like many grasslands and woodlands around the world, are 'open ecosystems' that have been shaped by histories of fire and grazing. State prohibitions and fire suppression policies have stigmatized traditional burning. The legacy of these prohibitions is manifested in social silence around fire and social forgetting about managed burning. State policies, changing economies, and climate change are combining to cause the rapid disappearance of grasslands around the world. Material and imaginative legacies of fire suppression shape our responses to contemporary fires.

Tinkering with fire: Mending reindeer grazing pastures in Finnmark, by Janike Larsen

Native and indigenous landscape practices are grounded in century-long traditions of care for the landscape harvested from. A well-measured outtake of berries, burning wood, meat and fish have contributed to well-balances ecologies of human and non-human actors. As climate change is propelling and temperatures rise, some species ‘misbehave’: Empetrum nigrum is one such species and is triumphantly winning the competition for habitat and progressing to deteriorate reindeer grazing pastures all over Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway.

This presentation argues that care-taking as an attentive action is necessary, and discusses prescribed fire as a way of managing Empetrum nigrum and mending meadow land across the territory.

Fire regimes and what it means to reinstate them: lessons from Australia, by Jon Rasmus Nyquist

In this presentation I draw on fieldwork with fire managers in Western Australia to outline some characteristics of a regime as a pattern of human-landscape relations. A fire regime can be used to describe the pattern in which fire occurs in a landscape, but it can also point to one characteristic way humans involve themselves with something that can be swayed and affected, but not controlled. I see a fire regime as a way of being involved with a landscape to keep it suspended in a condition where it tends to burn in tolerable ways. Based on the practices and experiences of fire managers who try very hard to maintain a fire regime, and think deeply about what would happen if their regime were lost or weakened, I reflect on some of the unique challenges of restoration when what is to be restored is a regime.

PhD Course: Planting the Environmental Humanities - Theories and Methods

Time and place: Sep. 4, 2023 – Sep. 7, 2023, Oslo Botanical Gardens & The University of Oslo

Call for Applications: PhD Course on "Planting the Environmental Humanities - Theories and Methods"
Convenors: Michelle Bastian and Ursula Münster
Organiser: Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), University of Oslo
Cofunding: Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH)

Description

What is it that plants can do? These beings, thought for so long in western philosophy to do very little, are now astounding so many as wider understandings develop of their capacities for feeling, communicating and captivating. Already turning towards the agencies of non-human animals, the Environmental Humanities has been called upon to pay more attention to all the ‘unloved others’ that the field has yet to engage with. Plants, fungi, insects, micro-organisms, pests have started to draw scholars attention, analysis and engagement, challenging what forms of life can provoke and inspire research in the field.

Plants in particular have been explored, not only for how they participate in all kinds of human worlds, but the ways they actively shape and influence them via myriad ‘planty agencies’ (Head and Atchison). ‘Invasive’ plants, as well as the ‘superweeds’ produced through widespread herbicide use, challenge the supposed dominance of humanity over all it surveys; while garden and agricultural plants could be thought of as making use of the handy humans to assist in propagation and generational continuation. Not separate from another great interest in Environmental Humanities – the geologic, the botanic also echoes through deep time. The first mass extinction – the Great Oxygenation Event – was caused by photosynthesising bacteria leading to organisms such as ourselves that now depend on oxygen. Fossil fuels, of course, continue to release the energy first captured through photosynthesis many millions of years ago.

Critical work on the role of global monocrop agriculture, together with the forced human labour at the centre of pre-industrial colonial economies, has been demarcated as the Plantationocene. Here the emphasis is on the dominance of tobacco, cotton and sugar, harvested not for local use, but grown in huge quantities specifically for international export. While capitalism is often traced back to the industrial revolution, others have argued that it was the earlier plantations that first introduced and refined the logics of cheap nature, forced labour, and extractive approaches to resources, thus laying the groundwork for what was to follow. This Plantationocene is not to be thought of as only a historical process either, with much work showing the continuing link with the current expansion of palm oil, coffee and cocoa plantations (to name a few), many still reliant on the labour of enslaved peoples.

The continuing expansion of monocrops with their simplified ecologies has led Anna Tsing to call for reconceptualising sustainability as “a multispecies affair” depending on the possibility of the resurgence of more-than-human life forms. She argues that “the biggest threat to resurgence is the simplification of the living world as a set of assets for future investments”. As a contrast then, Natasha Myers has argued for what she called the ‘Planthroposcene’, a “counterpose” to the Plantationocene which emphasises the ways that plants actively make the world within which we live, indeed without them we could not exist. To forge different paths in the Anthropocene then, depends on building new relationships with plants and “learn[ing] to garden otherwise”. Thus as Donna Haraway has argued in her take on these current ‘cenes’, “our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.”

In this PhD Course, hosted and organised by members of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH), we will explore key contemporary questions around plants that are arising in the field. Facilitated by a group of leading scholars with a range of disciplinary backgrounds, we will focus on emplaced learning, research and teaching-methods through which we will engage with those aspects of our research studies that are best illuminated through the lens of plant agencies and lifeways. Taking place in the Oslo Botanic Garden, and engaging closely with the grounds and botanical expertise, we will explore theories and methods for working with plants in environmental humanities today. Our aim is to generate situated experiences and discussions that will support participants’ evolving research projects. Participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas about their engagement with plant studies, in all their forms, in their own research, through a combination of place-based activities and facilitated participatory discussions. They will also be expected to read preparatory texts in advance of the school which will inform the activities and communal discussion during the workshop.

The PhD course has two parts and will combine an intensive two day workshop (4-5 September) with optional participation in the NoRS-EH Symposium – Transdisciplinarity in the Environmental Humanities (6-7 September).

Activities

Activities at the two day workshop will include:

A workshop on “Botanical Somatics” with sensory ethnographer Susanne Schmitt (RIFS, Potsdam)
An Introduction to Botanical Garden research and walk with Anneleen Kool (Natural History Museum, Oslo)
Modules on cutting edge work in critical plant studies with an exciting group of scholars including Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh/Oslo), Scott Bremer (University of Bergen), Anna-Katharina Laboissière (University of Oslo/OSEH), and Libby Robin (Australian National University).
Roundtable on botanic gardens as sites for environmental humanities research.
Opportunities to share and reflect on work with peers.

Participants will be asked to submit a short reflective paper (max 1500 words) on an aspect of their project that they would like to discuss and receive feedback on. This could be focused on approaches to methods, writing, theories, field sites etc., including areas where things are going well, or where supportive ideas would be helpful. During the course, participants will discuss, receive, and give feedback on the paper with fellow participants and the contributing scholars. Participants’ papers should be submitted no later than 4th August 2023. ,

Application

Places at the PhD course are limited to 15 participants. If you are interested in joining us, please send a short CV (max. 2-pages) as well as a short statement (max. 800 words) in which you outline your current research project, how it relates to the topic of the Researcher School, and your motivation for attending. The extended deadline for applications is 19 June 2023. We will get back to you with a decision by 21 June 2023.

Who can apply?

Participants must be enrolled in a PhD program to join this course. You can attend at any stage of your project. Please note that we are aware that participants may have different ranges of abilities and support needs and we will adjust our programming, as needed and where we can, to enable all participants to be fully involved.

Fees

There is no fee to attend the course, and lunches and two planned dinners are included. However, participants are responsible for paying their own travel and lodging, except NoRS-EH members, who will have their travel and accommodation costs covered by the Researcher School. Membership of NoRS-EH is open to current PhD students based in Norwegian universities working with environmental humanities related topics and methods.

Application details

Please submit your application by following the link below, and make sure that you include the following:

your name
your department or program and your university
title and expected completion date of doctoral project
a 800-word(max) statement of your doctoral project and motivation for attending
a 2-page(max) CV
contact information with email address

Submit your application by 19 June 2023!

Facts about the course

Credits: 3 ECTS for just the two-day workshop, 5 ECTS for attendance at both the workshop and subsequent symposium.
Language of instruction: English
Registration deadline for accepted participants: 1 July 2023
Evaluation: Pass/Fail based on active and full attendance, engagement with the course literature, reading reflective papers and acting as a main discussant for a nominated paper.

EcoLit Now! International Symposium on Ecocritical Literary Studies and the Environmental Humanities

The EcoLit Research Group and the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) invite you to an International Symposium to illustrate how literary and cultural studies can make important contributions and interventions in relation to environmental problems and aspirations. Join us for this exciting line-up of lectures, a roundtable discussion, and more.

Time and place: May 24, 2023 2:00 PM – 7:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, auditorium 5

About the symposium

Literary and cultural texts that explore environmental issues provide important sites for ecocritical analysis. Within the broader framework of the environmental humanities, this symposium will illustrate how literary and cultural studies situated in different historical, cultural, and language contexts can make important contributions and interventions in relation to environmental problems and aspirations. Participants will engage with interdisciplinary fields such as ecocriticism, multispecies studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, and animality studies, as well as environmental justice, biopolitics, and cultural theory broadly conceived. A roundtable discussion will focus on ecocritical literary studies within the framework of environmental humanities at the University of Oslo and beyond. Join us for this international symposium! Coffee and refreshments will be served. Please register to attend.

Program

14:00 - Welcome and Opening Remarks
- Ursula Münster, Director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH)
14:15 - OSEH Environmental Humanities Lecture
- Michael Lundblad (EcoLit Research Group Leader): How to Live Together with Rats: Multispecies Literary Idiorrhythmy
15:00 - Roundtable Discussion
- Ecocritical Literary Studies and the Environmental Humanities
- Participants: Sissel Furuseth, Gro Bjørnerud Mo, Teresa Pepe, Pierre du Plessis
- Moderated by: Michael Lundblad
16:15 - Panel: Ecocriticism in Action
- Inger Østenstad, The Mark of Global Warming in a Contemporary Norwegian Realist Novel
- Stefka Eriksen (Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research), Notions of Energy in Old Norse Culture
- Chiara Lanza (University of Ferrara, Italy), Soils Criticism: How Can Soils Emerge from Environmental Narratives?
- Guðrun í Jákupsstovu (University of Bern, Switzerland), Deep Time Mythologised: Reading the Anthropocene in Morten Strøksnes' Havboka
- Moderated by: Gro Bjørnerud Mo
18:15 - Keynote Lecture
- Jihan Zakarriya (Aarhus University, Denmark), Gender and Environmental Violence in Modern Arabic Literature
- Introduction and moderator: Teresa Pepe

Organizer

The EcoLit Research Group and The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH)

This Land on which our Ancestors Lived

A conversation on Land Rights and Landback from a Sámi Indigenous Perspective.

Time and place: May 8, 2023 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, Domus Bibliotheca

Indigenous worldviews are shaped by our relationship to the land; the worlds we live in and besides are created in a mutual interaction between and to people, land, waters, entities, and cosmology. It is this nexus of relations that shapes our very existence as ways of being (ontology), of knowing (epistemology), and doing (axiology).
In the (North) Sámi language, this is expressed as ‘birgejupmi’.

Conceived of as the 'maintenance of good life', birgejupmi express that in order for someone to live a good life both socially, economically, spiritually and in respect to health, it is necessary to maintain a close connection between people and communities, to landscape, environment, ecosystem and cosmology.

Within such a philosophy, the land is recognized as an entity with a subjective will. Sadly, the knowledge systems of the West, with few exceptions, are dependent on a human centric perspective. Exposed to such epistemic ignorance, Indigenous perspectives on the land is disregarded. Instead, the land that offers us nourishment and ground our communities, becomes an an object for the taking; something that may be claimed for selfish and financial reasons.

In this conversation, Indigenous Sámi human rights-and land defenders are convened to speak on their relationship to land as well as their land-based practices. In so doing, we also challenge the Western and colonial understanding of land and the consequent disregard of the subjectivity of non-human entities, exploring the notions of land rights and the process of landback. The conversation is commissioned by Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) at the University of Oslo and facilitated by Sámi scholar Dr. Liisa-Rávná Finbog, from the Norwegian side of the border.

Also participating in the discussion are poets and human rights-and land defenders Ida Helene Benonisen and Timimie Märak from the Norwegian and Swedish side of the border, respectively, as well as influencer, human rights-and land defender, Emmi Nuorgam from the Finnish side of the border, and lastly, politician, duojár, human rights-and land defender Beaska Niillas from the Norwegian side of the border.

Mending Airscapes: Habitats and species in the air

An airscape is an intangible presence in our daily life. Seemingly invisible and transparent, air, wind, and light form airscapes that have been overlooked as a cohesive totality with its own cultural history. Airscapes are spaces of injustice, transportation, and perception. This seminar aims to understand airscapes as more than just a passive receptacle of human activity but rather a presence that shapes us and our way of relating to the world.

Time and place: Apr. 20, 2023 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, SUM Arne Næss Room

Program

14:15 Karen V. Lykke: Welcome and introduction
14:25 Susanne Normann: Saami reindeer herding or wind energy development? The multiple meanings of wind as part of the airscape in the Fosen Peninsula
14:45 William Wessel Nore: Aerial managerialism and the dream of the sustainable family farm in the industrial welfare state (1955-65)
15:20 Helga Iselin Wåseth: Designing for darkness
15:40 Panel led by Annabel Mempel

Presentation Abstracts (in order of program)

Saami reindeer herding or wind energy development? The multiple meanings of wind as part of the airscape in the Fosen Peninsula, by Susanne Normann

For the reindeer, to move with the winds help to avoid predators, and the wind helps them smell danger over long distances. In cold and harsh winters, the wind can blow the snow off the mountain tops so they can find much needed food. For Saami herders, the complex knowledge of the winds allows them to perfectionate their herding abilities, and for some, the winds also have a deeper spiritual meaning. But in our time of climate crisis, the winds are changing. They can become storms or change direction, threatening the survival of many livelihoods around the planet. In the Nordic context, they have also gained importance among policymakers to mitigate climate change. Wind energy development is conceived as an important means of decarbonizing the economy and enabling investment in mountain landscapes that challenge the historic use of land and air spaces by reindeer herders. Europe's largest onshore wind energy project is being built on the Fosen Peninsula in Norway but has been declared invalid by Norway's Supreme Court. In March 2023, Saami youth and environmentalists blocked the entrances of several ministries in Oslo for a week to demand justice and the demolition of the contested wind turbines as the only available means for restauration, and to draw public attention to the ongoing colonial situation in Norway. Focusing on the Fosen case, this presentation discusses winds and other aspects of the airscape from the perspective of multiple actors, arguing that the air, in addition to the land, has become a space of contestation and resistance in the context of Nordic colonialism.

Aerial managerialism and the dream of the sustainable family farm in the industrial welfare state (1955-1965), by William Wessel Nore

William Wessel Nore is an art and photo historian working on the use of aerial photography in post-war Norwegian agricultural rationalization and the role of photography in shaping rural modernity in the industrial welfare state. In this presentation, Wessel Nore will show how the airborne camera was vital in the post-war reconfiguration of the Norwegian agricultural landscape and the emergence of a new form of managerial vision and interpretation. The airborne camera allowed old patterns of inhabitation and production to be rendered synoptically visible and interpretable, turning the airscape above the landscape into an infrastructural space of agricultural rationality and management. The presentation draws on material from Wessel Nore’s ongoing work with his dissertation on the aerial image and the construction of Norwegian rural modernity. The dissertation also explores the relationship between governmental ways of seeing and the emergence of rural vernacular photographic cultures in the Norwegian industrial welfare state.

Designing for darkness, by Helga Iselin Wåseth

Why darkness is so important to preserve for the sake of biodiversity, and how to manage the balance between the human’s need for light and nature’s need for darkness.

In recent years, more attention has been paid to the negative effects of ALAN (Artificial light at night) on nature, and several researchers are now calling for action. In this lecture, the effects of artificial light at night on nature are emphasised, and further focus is on how darkness can be restored while preserving visibility where that is needed.

Organizers

This seminar is organised by Centre for Development and the Environment, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, and Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene through the Restorations collaboratory which is funded by OSEH.

Film screening with introduction: Nuclear Cattle

"Nuclear cattle" is a documentary about cattle farmers and their animals after the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 2011.

Tid og sted: 16. mars 2023 12:00 – 14:30, Auditorium 2, Sophus Bugges hus

«Nuclear cattle” is a documentary by Tamotsu Matsubara that tells the story of cattle farmers forced from their homes and the cows they left behind after the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 2011.

There will be an introduction before the film and a roundtable discussion after the viewing.

Program

Introduction: 12:00-12:05
Film: 12:05-13:45
Roundtable discussion: 13:45-14:20

Panelists

Sonja Irene Åman, Doctoral Research Fellow (IKOS)
Gabriele Koch, Associate Professor (IKOS)
Pierre Du Plessis, Researcher (IKOS)
Aike Peter Rots, Associate Professor (IKOS)
Sakura Koretsune, Guest Researcher (IKOS)

Introductory remarks

Marius Christoph Palz, Doctoral Research Fellow (IKOS)

Moderator

Chiaki Nishjima , Senior Lecturer (IKOS)

Organizers

HumSam-biblioteket, Japan studier, Institutt for kulturstudier og orientalske språk og Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH).

2022

Mending Waterscapes: Restoring River Landscapes

The destruction and pollution of rivers was a precondition for early urbanisation. With this seminar we invite you to explore intersections and tensions that exist between how the historical, cultural and natural sciences approach the restoration of river landscapes.

Time and place: Nov. 29, 2022 2:15 PM – 5:00 PM, Sophus Bugges Hus Seminarrom 2 / Zoom

Program

14:15 Karen Lykke Syse and Erica Colman-Denstad: Welcome and Introduction
14:25: Jonathan E. Colman: In the twilight zone: Challenges to restoring riparian zones are not (eco)logical
14:45 Malin Kristine Graesse: Moving water and fish: Notes on the relationship between design and river restoration
15:05 Martin Lee Müller: Restoring river landscapes and river mindscapes. Between science, art and community engagement.
15:25 Coffee break
15:40 Gro Ween: Returning from the brink of extinction. Thinking with Akerselva Salmon.
16:00 Knut Nustad: Trout and the future of colonial river landscapes in South Africa: Contemporary debates.
16:20 Coffee break
16:30 Panel led by William Nore

Presentation abstracts

In the twilight zone: Challenges to restoring riparian zones are not (eco)logical by Jonathan E. Colman

Jonathan E. Colman (ecologist) has been lecturing and working with restoration ecology for over 20 years. In this time, and long before, the importance of riparian zones and the ecological functions they perform along small brooks, streams, rivers, lakes and more has been well recognized in the scientific community. Colman will present a brief background into riparian zones, their degradation, and some examples of restoration efforts in Norway. Importantly, Colman claims that there exists a serious lack of engagement, understanding or knowledge amongst the key actors involved when aiming to restore riparian zones. What is really happening? Why is restoring riparian zones in practice so easy, yet in reality still so difficult? How can we better understand and improve the present situation?

Moving water and fish: Notes on the relationship between design and river restoration by Malin Kristine Graesse

Graesse is an art and design historian working with the role of design in river restoration and fisheries management. In this presentation she will discuss the relationship between nature conservation, cultural heritage management and landscape design in river restoration projects. The presentation draws on material from her Ph.D. dissertation on the design history of fishways where she also explored the methodological potential of bringing art and design historical perspectives into nature conservation discourses.

Restoring river landscapes and river mindscapes. Between science, art and community engagement by Martin Lee Müller

Since his debut Being Salmon, Being Human (2017), ecophilosopher Martin Lee Mueller has been working at the crossroads between academia, art, and community engagement, on 4the double-theme of restoring rivers landscapes and restorying river mindscapes. A baseline for Mueller’s work is the argument that ecological restoration goes hand in hand with cultural restorying. Most recently, this work has propelled a community-driven festival on the Akerselva River in Oslo. MOTSTRØMS – “Against the Current” – began as a salmon homecoming festival in 2021, ten years after a fatal chlorine spill. In 2022, MOTSTRØMS has developed into a Deep Ecology Festival, a deep, annual inbreath between the human and the more-than-human, and a hub for cultural metamorphosis.

Returning from the brink of extinction. Thinking with Akerselva Salmon by Gro Ween

Some wild animal species adapt well to urbanization, but as Akerselva provides testimony of, this is not the case with wild salmon. Up until the 1970s, salmon was a rare occurrence in Akerselva, Oslo's inner city's much neglected waterway. Today, Akerselva has become a loved green attraction, and the city celebrates the return of wild salmon in the river. Multiple webpages describe the wonder of being able to fish a 10 kilo wild salmon, almost from the beer terrace of the groovy inner city jazz venue, Blå. In this talk I describe the many kinds of work involved in bringing salmon back from the threat of extinction, and what this story can tell us about extinction, salmon, wild and tame, care for fish and landscape, in and beyond Akerselva.

Trout and the future of colonial river landscapes in South Africa: Contemporary debates by Knut Nustad

What does it mean to restore river landscapes profoundly altered by land dispossessions and colonialism? Where policies for curbing pollution went hand in hand with the introduction of alien species for sport and the ‘Anglification’ of landscapes? The presentation gives an overview of contemporary debates in South Africa, and how these are entangled in wider conversations about property, restoration and attempts at undoing colonial histories.

Organizer

Restorations: Mending Heritage Landscapes and Biodiversity and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities

SOILS Inaugural Lecture: Growing the Environment out of the Soil

How can personal engagement with planetary health restore human health and the well-being of more-than-human others? In this inaugural lecture of the Fellesløft project ‘Anthropogenic SOILS’, environmental historian Libby Robin, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, will review the emergence of the idea of the environment in the wake of the ‘dirty thirties’, a time when topsoil blew away – in both Australia and in the United States, and the hope of ‘feeding the world’ was threatened.

Time and place: Aug. 29, 2022 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM, 12. etasje, Niels Treschows hus

About the event

Soil demands a practical science that works hand-in-hand with land management. Some of its important technical and practical insights in the 1930s came across from the vast grain-fields of Ukraine, where top soil loss had a long history. Soil is fundamental to feeding people. The geopolitics of famine has a history dating back to the beginnings of agriculture. Its implications are evident in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As the Great Acceleration unfolded in the years of post-war reconstruction, soil science (pedology) worked hand in hand with emerging ‘environmental science’, a cross-disciplinary collaboration. Ecologists and soil scientists led the fray, but many other specialists (geomorphologists, physicists, chemists and microbiologists) shaped the emerging idea. 1962 was the year that people started describing themselves as ‘environmental scientists’. It was also the year that Rachel Carson intervened with Silent Spring, her parable from small town America that shook the world. This was a story about industrial pollutants that killed the birdsong of spring. Silent Spring made science urgent and personal. Ecology and activism were united. People were part of the environment.

In the decades that followed, the environment has come to include air pollution, waste management, energy conservation and urban planning. Global warming has changed the future for humans and for more-than-human others. Environmental managers now realise that they are not managing ‘nature’, but rather the human behaviours that cause ecosystem collapse, extinctions and diseases, that tear apart the very fabric of the tiny and precious layer of the Earth system where life can survive, the Biosphere. Soil feeds into and out of these big ideas. It works on a personal scale, enabling environmental action on a global scale, by encouraging ordinary people to notice, to listen and to care about their environment, whether it is a local bushland, a garden allotment, or a city park. We need to do as Rachel Carson did, to listen up to the silences, and to challenge behaviours that are damaging to ourselves and the planet.

Join us for this exciting start of a new project!

About the presenter

Libby Robin is a Curator-at-Large, historian of science and writer. She has worked with museums in Australia, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and Norway, exploring the way museums and art can enable ordinary people to engage with big ideas like climate change and the Anthropocene. She is co-author (with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin) of The Environment: A History of the Idea and many other books, including Curating the Future (which she co-edited with Jenny Newell and Kirsten Wehner). Libby is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her next book, ‘What Birdo is That?’, is about the role of ‘bird people’ in conservation in Australia. It will be published in 2023 by Melbourne University Publishing.

Perpetual renewal: the fiction of decommissioning

What do we mean when we say and think "after oil"? In this talk Graeme Macdonald, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick (UK), will examine a range of literary and artistic examples constituting a significant expression of petroculture: the post-oil imaginary.

Time and place: June 14, 2022 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, seminarrom 1

A fundamental feature of first wave research in the academic and creative field of Petrocultures was the effort to make oil and its infrastructures visible and salient objects of study for scholars across the Humanities. This work—still ongoing—has identified and produced a wide range of artistic and cultural imaginaries of oil, stretching across genres, territories and temporalities. Subsequent inquiry asked how to effectively categorise these multiple registrations of petromodernity; a world-systemic phenomenon with planetary impacts that manifests in many local forms and styles. In cultural genres such as literature, this has generated questions of comparative perspective, interpretive method and environmental commitment.

A sustained focus on petroaesthetics is apparent in all of this, and subject to considerable debate; identified as working for and in favour of oil as much as offering a sustained and valuable critique of its operations and the lifeworld it reproduces. This debate leverages the stress on oil’s environmental dimensions in an age of climate anxiety. Consistent pressure is now exerted on the ends—meaning the objectives as well as the limits and transitions—of petroculture as an academic field and aesthetic phenomenon within the wider rubrics of the Energy Humanities.

This talk will focus on those ends or ‘afters’ of oil by examining a range of literary and artistic examples constituting a significant expression of petroculture: the post-oil imaginary. Petrofictions from the North Sea and beyond demonstrate how an “After Oil” sensibility is intrinsic to all oil culture and particularly pronounced in a time of decommissioning. In short: what do we mean when we say and think “after oil” and how might a focus on petroaesthetics help (or hinder) that process?

Graeme Macdonald is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He teaches and writes on petrofiction, petroculture and the Energy Humanities. He is editor of the Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities (2022). Recently edited journal collections include Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy (OLH 2019) and Environment, Ecology and ‘Nature’ in 21st Century Scottish Literature (Humanities 2021) and Food Futures (Science Fiction Studies, 2022). He edited a recent edition of John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (2015). A member of the Petrocultures Research Group, he is also contributor to After Oil (2016) and Solarities (2022). He was recently CI on the Royal Society of Edinburgh Humanities Research Network, Connecting with a low carbon Scotland and is presently CI on the FORMAS funded international research project Climaginaries: narrating socio-cultural transitions to a post-fossil society. He is co-author, with the WReC collective, of Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World Literature (2015).

This open lecture is an integrated part of the workshop Petrocultures Across Regions: a Comparative Perspective, organised by the OSEH collaboratory Critical Petroaesthetics.

Organizer

Critical Petroaesthetics

KLIMERtalk

The research group Climate, Environment and Energy, KLIMER, warmly welcomes Prof. Dr. Ole Georg Moseng from the University of South-Eastern Norway. He is one of the few specialists in the history of early modern epidemics.

Time and place: May 11, 2022 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, Café Snorre, Niels Treschows hus

In this talk, Professor Ole Georg Moseng will talk about the history of early modern epidemics.

Pandemics have haunted humanity since the dawn of time. The oldest victim of the plague we know of, died 5,000 years ago in Sweden. We now have our own painful experiences. Knowledge that diseases can be contagious is more than 2,000 years old. The doctor from the 17th century protected himself with much of the same as today's intensive care nurses. It is thought-provoking that we have fought the most dangerous pandemics of all time without access to effective drugs.

Organizer

KLIMER

ECODISTURB: Deep Anthropocene

Arne Naess' work and his philosophy, Deep Ecology, kick-started a global movement that put Nordic culture on the environmental map. What is his legacy today, and does it still have bearing in the epoch of the Anthropocene? Join us for a lively conversation around climate change, Nordic responses - and uncertainty. With Knut Ivar Bjørlykhaug and Martin Lee Müller, chaired by Gunnar Gjermundsen.

Time and place: Mar. 9, 2022 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM, Deichman, Grünerløkka

About this evening's speakers

Knut Ivar Bjørklykhaug

Knut Ivar is from Northwestern Norway and grew up with the seabirds. He’s a Social Worker, has a PhD in Social Work & Social Policy (2021), and currently works as a researcher and lecturer at VID specialized University in Oslo. The last years he’s been collaborating closely with (among others) Philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen, and together they edited the book “Det går til helvete. Eller? Kjærlighet, sorg og raseri i natur- og klimakrisens tid” (2020).

Martin Lee Müller

Martin Lee Müller is a postdoctoral researcher with the EU-funded consortium "SEAS - Science Education for Action and Engagement toward Sustainability", which has its academic home at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo. Martin’s writing interweaves moral philosophy, earth systems science, indigenous perspectives, ecoliteracy and ecopoetry. He is currrently working on the book The River Within. Towards an Ecopoetics of Childhood. Gunnar Gjermundsen is a psychologist and ECODISTURB doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo.

Organizer

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and ECODISTURB

2021

HYBRID: Restorations: Mending Heritage Landscapes and Biodiversity

How can we balance wilding agricultural land to increase biodiversity, while maintaining the cultural heritage within landscapes? Is it possible to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems, while restoring culture too? What issues are at stake in the UN Decade on Restoration?

Time and place: Nov. 29, 2021 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM, CET. Hybrid format - physically at seminarrom 3, Sophus Bugges hus, Blindern; digitally on Zoom.

Schedule

14:00 - Introduction by Karen Lykke Syse.
14:10 Dagmar Hagen on ecosystem restoration and whether it is possible to restore nature.
14:40 - Talk by Håkon Stokland on restoration, transformative change and learning from past efforts.
15:20 - Talk by Véronique Simon on whether we can balance natural and cultural heritage?
15:50 - Dag Jørund Lønning on the promise of regenerative land-use.
16:30 - Discussion panel led by Dag O. Hessen.

About the presenters

Dagmar Hagen

Dagmar Hagen is Senior Scientific Researcher at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. She has a PhD in Restoration Ecology, and also a MS in Public Administration. Dagmar has more than 20 years of experience with restoration research and restoration interventions. Her research has a throughout focus on the interface between social and natural sciences, and between science and on-the ground restoration. She is lead ecologist in the current two largest restoration projects in Norway; a 50 mill euro project of restoring a military area into National Park at Dovrefjell, and a 230 mill euro project of restoring a mining settlement at Svalbard into arctic wilderness.

Håkon Stokland

Håkon Stokland is a researcher at the Department of Terrestrial Biodiversity at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). He holds a PhD in interdisciplinary studies of culture and a master’s degree in history. He has also studied biology, chemistry and mathematics over three years as part of his bachelor’s degree in history, and has formerly worked as a marine biologist assistant. His research focus is on biodiversity governance and the role of management tools and knowledge in biodiversity-related politics. Topics of investigation include forest governance, restoration, climate budgets for ecosystems, nature mapping methodologies, environmental impact assessments, and wolf management.

Dr. Véronique Karine Simon Nielsen

Dr. Véronique Karine Simon Nielsen is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), Department of Heritage and Society. Educated as an architect and a landscape researcher, she has both professional and academic experience in architecture, cultural landscape approaches, and cultural heritage issues. Her research interests are topics related to heritage and landscape values in sensitive environments, localised geographical practices, and citizens’ participation. She is involved in several national and EU-funded research and innovation projects.

Dag Jørund Lønning

Dag Jørund Lønning is professor of creativity and rural development and rector at The University College for Green Development in Bryne. He has worked with environmentally friendly land-use models for many years, and is particularly well-known for his books on regenerative agriculture (Jordboka, Jordboka II and Kompostboka). His first novel, Første Losebok. Naturanto (The Book of Regenesis in English) is released in November 2021. Lønning has received a number of awards for his works: Rural Blogger og the Year (2014), Rural Name of the Year (2015) and This Year’s Earthworm (2019).

Additional readings:

NINA. Fra steinur til natur: Er det mulig å stoppe tap av natur? https://www.nina.no/Aktuelt/Stories/Fra-steinur-til-natur (In Norwegian).
Mari Susanne Solerød. (2021, 26th of November). Naturen er en buffer mot klimaendringene. Forskning.no. https://forskning.no/klima-naturvern-norges-forskningsrad/naturen-er-en-buffer-mot-klimaendringene/1941527 (In Norwegian).

Organizer

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and Restorations Collaboratory

Monsters of the Anthropocene Halloween Symposium: Unruly Origins, Strange Futures

What do the futures of monster theory hold? And what stories can we tell about its origins? ‘Unruly Origins, Strange Futures’ explores the pasts and futures of thinking with monsters through art, politics, storytelling and scholarship.

Time and place: Oct. 29, 2021 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM, CET. Register for webinar on zoom.

Programme

PANEL 1: Collective voices and manifestos in monstrous times

This panel discussion revolves around community building as well as structures of inclusion and exclusion. In times of crisis (ecological, political, medical, technological, etc.), for whom is something an emergency, whose concerns are recognized and whose are silenced? Who get to belong and who are marginalized and potentially monsterized? We invite a discussion on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of communities and collective voices – such as labs, collectives, and manifestos - in order to explore the promises and limitations of monstrous kinship, family and community in the now, the past and potential futures.

Chair: Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (The Monsters of the Anthropocene Collaboratory)

Speakers:
•   Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University
•   Not Lone Wolf (art and research collective)
•   The Monster Network

PANEL 2: The Feeling of a Wild Slug Chewing – art-based methods workshop with artist Katja Aglert.

Bring your scholarly or/and artistic work in progress and learn some new monster methods! Katja Aglert guides you in an exploration of multi-sensorial experiences with monsters through forms of writing.

PANEL 3: Storytelling and the arts of monsters

We invite a panel discussion on the role of the monster in arts and storytelling practices, with a particular focus on how stories of monsters - as well as the monstrous as an analytical perspective and methodological tool - may (and may not) both challenge our understandings of the past and open up to unexpected and potentially more promising futures. We also ask: what are the limits to the figure of the monster? And what are the challenges when working with the monstrous in arts and storytelling? The panel can engage with a broad range of art and storytelling, from science fiction to performance, visual arts and tv series, novels and comics, etc.

Chair: Line Henriksen (Monsters of the Anthropocene Collaboratory)

Speakers:
•   Regina Kanyu Wang, University of Oslo
•   Marietta Radomska, Linköping University
•   Susanne Winterling, artist, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art
•   Sami Ahmad Khan, University of Oslo

Organizer

Monsters of the Anthropocene Collaboratory

Guest lecture: Anne Karin Sæther on the goodness of Norwegian oil

The OSEH collaborative laboratory “Critical Petroaesthetics” invites you to an open guest lecture with Anne Karin Sæther.

Time and place: June 15, 2021 1:00 PM–2:00 PM, Sophus Bugge’s House, Seminar Room 1

Politicians often refer to Norway as a pioneer in climate and environment. At the same time as we are supposed to save the climate, we are making money selling fossil oil and gas, which harm the climate. How have politicians and the oil industry managed to reconcile these conflicting roles? Can Norwegian oil represent a form of goodness, after all?

Anne Karin Sæther will give a lecture based on the book The best intentions. The oil country in the climate fight (2017), where she discusses some of the myths about petroleum that have helped to shape Norwegian political culture.

Sæther is an author and political advisor to the Norwegian Education Association. She holds a major in journalism from the University of Oslo and has previously worked for NRK, Dagsavisen and the Bellona Environmental Foundation.

The guest lecture is organized by the OSEH collaborative laboratory “Critical Petroaesthetics” and is open to all interested parties as far as infection control regulations allow.

Perpetual renewal: the fiction of decommissioning

What do we mean when we say and think "after the oil"? In this talk, Graeme Macdonald, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick (UK), will illuminate a number of literary and artistic expressions of "the post-oil imaginary".

Time and place: 14. june 2022 13:00 – 14:15, Sophus Bugges hus, seminar room 1

Organizer

This open lecture is part of the workshop Petrocultures Across Regions: a Comparative Perspective, organized by the OSEH Collaborative Critical Petroaesthetics.

WEBINAR: Augmented Nature

The Bionic Natures collaboratory is hosting a public talk by Mick Geerits and Arthur Gouillart, who will present their collaborative project Augmented Nature—a set of robotic tools designed to help animals survive the ongoing planetary mass extinction.

Time and place: June 9, 2021 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.

Carried out in close collaboration with scientists, the aim of Augmented Nature was to develop the next generation of high-tech biotags: devices capable of augmenting the capacities of endangered species. These active solutions allow so-called "Ecosystem Engineer" species, such as the humpback whale and the peccary, to reclaim their own habitats. In exploring the potential of technological interventions to affect change in the environment, Augmented Nature considers the ethics of biodiversity preservation and the intricate entanglement between humans and non-humans.

About the presenters

Arthur Gouillart is an artist and designer based in London. In 2018, he graduated from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College with an MA/MSC in Innovation Design Engineering, following an MEng in France. As a creative technologist and speculative designer, he explores the intersection of meaningful emotions and complex systems. By making the unseen tangible through materialisation and inverting hierarchies of value, his work questions existing perspectives and proposes new ones. Recent exhibitions include the London Design Biennale (2021); Hong Kong Design Week, Haw Par (2020); 'Intimacy', Science Gallery, Dublin (2019); 'Un_becoming', Somos Berlin (2018); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2017). He is currently working on two web-based artworks as part of the "New School Policy and Design for Outer Space'" at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2021). Website here:

Mick Geerits is a design technologist with a keen interest in emergent systems, algorithmic design and digital manufacturing. He is co-founder of Abnormal Design, a UK based generative product design studio, which creates designs using digital processes that mimic nature. He currently also works as a Technical Artist focusing on growth algorithms and procedural asset generation for one of the Xbox Studios. Mick holds a BSc in Industrial Design from the Technical University Eindhoven and in 2018 graduated from the MSc and MA Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

The event is hosted by the Bionic Natures Collaboratory of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities.

Published Mar. 4, 2025 12:18 PM - Last modified Aug. 28, 2025 11:20 AM