Workshops and conferences

2024

Knowing Natures Eco-Slam 2024

Come and join us for an Eco-slam organised by students of UiO's Environmental Humanities and Sciences Certificate program!

Time and place: Oct. 29, 2024 4:15 PM – 7:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus

About the event

The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities invites you to the Knowing Natures Eco-Slam, where students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours certificate (EHS) present their final projects, developed during the Knowing Natures course. Come explore the projects as they are presented through live music, poetry, paintings, (edible) art, science experiments, games, food, meditation and much more.

Programme

16:15 - 17:00: Project Displays
- Hourly guided art walks with short presentations of projects
16:15 - 19:00: EcoSlam Reception
18:30: Final Guided Art Walk

Projects presented

Carolin Birgit Maria Bauer - Wonderous Waves - The Pulse of Nature
Felix Benjamin Blixt Hasle - Nature and wine - The past and the future of European winemaking.
Tianshu Li - What are we eating, ACTUALLY?
Dyah Kumolo Tunjungsari - A Futuristic Oslo in 2054
Racha Yacef Hanine - Our focus shapes our future
Lucas Wenk-Wolff - Lost, but not forgotten
Maria Varvara Varelaki - The Two Horizons of the Aegean: Landscape, History and Identity
Julie Charlotte Ruby Clausen - Growing roots meditation
Claudia Glaos - Sustainable Art for a Greener Future
Asad Jonas Munir Arshad - Knowing Nature: A relative Perspective
Maria del Carmen Gonzales Torres - Re-Imagining Natures
Mikayla Marazzi - Project Sunlight: How the Light Gets In

About the EHS programme

From climate change and biodiversity loss to bio-accumulating toxins and emerging diseases, we are increasingly faced with challenges that are simultaneously social and environmental in nature. The Honours Certificate in Environmental Humanities and Sciences (EHS) gives Master's students at the University of Oslo a platform to deepend their understanding of the complex relationships between humans and their environments in a rapidly changing world.

Environmental Humanities and Sciences is the first Master Honours Certificate to be offered in Norway with an interdisciplinary focus on environmental topics, based at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. It runs in parallel with the students' main Master Programme, over the course of two years.

2023

Knowing Natures Eco-Slam 2023

Welcome to an exhibition with project displays, and an guided art walk by students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours Certificate!

Time and place: Nov. 3, 2023 1:00 PM – 6:00 PM, Sophus Bugges Hus

About the event

The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities invites you to the Knowing Natures Eco-Slam, where students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours certificate (EHS) present their final projects, developed during the Knowing Natures course. Come explore the projects as they are presented through performance, image, text, sound and other installations.

The event is open to all!

Programme

13:00 - 16:00: Project Displays
Hourly guided art walks with short presentations of projects
16:00 - 18:00: EcoSlam Reception
17:00: Final Guided Art Walk

This year's projects

Angelique Rein (Development, Environment and Cultural Change) and Hannah Nelson (Screen Cultures), Waterways
Austra Apsite (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), And yet they look up in Reverence: A Tale of the Tree-People and the Oak
Christopher Viken (Linguistics), Seagulls: Matter out of place or place out of matter?
Emilie Eriksen (Pharmaceutics) and Live Røstadsand (Human Geography), Nature Walk: Forest, Sea, and City in the Oslo area
Han Yu (Data Science), Experience Sustainable Transportation around Aker Brygge and Hovedøya
Holly Benna (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), Last Light: Experiments with the Autumn Sun
Louisa Crysmann (Social Anthropology), "Caain da hill" - a short film about working with Shetland sheep
Magnus Hole Fjetland (Psychology), My Sinsen Nonhuman Environment
Magnus Olav Nyaas Ravnå (Social Anthropology), Constructing the Cuyahoga
Marius Beck (Teacher Education Programme), Astereognosis
Melissa Kristiansen (The Study of Religion), City badgers in Etterstad allotment garden
Miyo Tanaka (The Theory and Practice of Human Rights), Akerselva's Echoes Crafted in Bytes & Verse
Ragnhild Møgedal (Geosciences), Kaupanghytta - A Generational Breathing Place
Sunniva Reinertsen (The Theory and Practice of Human Rights), Fashioning a greener future
Suzanne Roheim (Philosophy), Visuals of a dying fjord
Tiril Ruud Pisani (Psychology), Conversations with Trees
Tuva Sverdrup-Thygeson (General and Comparative Literature), Balcony Food Garden. The Human—Nature Connections in the scent of tomato plants.
Ty Holtzman (Social Anthropology), Arctica: to be part of a polar landscape
Vebjørn Kløgetvedt (Gender Studies), Ode to unromantic nature
Wanxian Zhang (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), Terraced Treasures: Mountain Agriculture in a Changing Landscape

About the EHS programme

Organizer

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and Environmental Humanities and Sciences

Transdisciplinary in the Environmental Humanities Symposium

Come and join us on 6 & 7 September for a NoRS-EH Symposium on "Transdisciplinary in the Environmental Humanities"!

Time: Sep. 6, 2023 – Sep. 7, 2023

Programme

Keynotes and Panels

About the symposium

As the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) - led by PI Dolly Jørgensen at The Greenhouse, University of Stavanger - starts its 5th year, the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) is organizing a symposium on “Transdisciplinary in the Environmental Humanities” on 6 and 7 September 2023 at the University of Oslo. This 2-day symposium will highlight the innovative environmental humanities research happening in Norway and neighboring Scandinavian countries, especially by early career researchers.

Programme

September 6, Museum of Cultural History

13:00 - 15:00 Parallel Panel Session 1

Art and the Planetary
- Chair: Malin Graesse
- Place: Seminar room, St Olavs gate 29
Artistic Interventions
- Chair: Anna Mossolova
- Place: Foredragssalen, 3rd floor, Musem of Culture History
Plants, Place, and Literature
- Chair: Melanie Duckworth
- Place: Kilden, 2nd floor, Museum of Culture History

15:30 Keynote by Dolly Jørgensen: Transdisciplinarity in Environmental Humanities: The Many, The One, The Collective
Place: Foredragssalen, 3rd floor, Museum of Culture History

16:30 Panel debate, "Transdisciplinarity and the Environmental Humanities", with Libby Robin, Kyrre Kverndokk, Hanna Musiol, and Susanne Schmitt
Place: Foredragssalen, 3rd floor, Museum of Culture History

September 7, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus

9:00-11:00 Parallel panel session 2: From soil to soiling: exploring the agency of soils across research fields
Chair: Anna Krzywoszynska and Alexandra Regan Toland
Place: Room 1, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus

Interspecies Interactions of the Anthropocene in Marine Environments
- Chair: Dmitrijs Porsnovs
- Place: Room 2, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus
In the search of new methods amidst the sense of doom
- Chair: Agnese Bankovska
- Place: Room 3, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus

11:30-13:00 Keynote by Kate Rigby: Synergies, Surprises and Snags: Transdisciplinary Adventures in the Environmental Humanities
Place: Auditorium 2, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus

Parallel panel session 3: From soil to soiling: exploring the agency of soils across research fields (continued)

Chair: Anna Krzywoszynska and Alexandra Regan Toland
Place: Room 1, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus

Reading Nature and Science through Fiction and Poetry
- Chair: Katri Aholainen
- Place: Room 2, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus
Transdisciplinary Methods Through the Ocean
- Chair: Nina Halton-Hernandez
- Place: Room 3, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus
16:30-18:30 Parallel panel session 4
- Explorations in interdisciplinarity, knowledge creation and circulation
- Chair: Þóra Pétursdóttir
- Place: Room 1, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus
The Humanities 4 the Ocean: Breaking through disciplinary boundaries
- Chair: Cristina Brito & Nina Vieira
- Place: Room 2, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus
Environmental Storytelling
- Chair: Sara Asu Schroer
- Place: Room 3, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern campus

Organising committee

Gro Birgit Ween (UiO) and Þóra Pétursdóttir (UiO).

Organizer

Oslo School for Environmental Humanities (OSEH).

Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia: New Perspectives in the Medical-Environmental Humanities and History

Come join us on 1-2 June for the workshop "Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia: New Perspectives in the Medical-Environmental Humanities and History".

Time and place: June 1, 2023 9:00 AM – June 2, 2023 4:00 PM, Georg Sverdrups hus, UiO

About the workshop

This workshop aims to develop a multidisciplinary dialogue on the entanglements of politics, society, ecology, environment, health, and disease in the regions of East-Central Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, bringing together scholars in the history of medicine and the medical humanities with scholars in environmental history and the environmental humanities.

It aims to deepen understandings of regional particularities and traditions, including a possible divergence in approaches to environment and health in Eurasia from approaches taken in other regions, such as Western Europe, East Asia, and South Asia.

At the same time, the workshop aims to explore the local, transnational, international, and global connections, circulations, and integrations that cut through and extend beyond the regions of Eurasia and call its distinctiveness into question. It aims to foster a discussion about what the study of the regions of Eurasia might contribute to the developing fields of medical-environmental humanities and medical-environmental history.

Questions that the workshop will address include:

Where were links between the physical environment, health, and disease made visible in the regions of Eurasia, and where were they obscured? How can these developments be explained?
Which categories, concepts, disciplines, and practices were employed to analyse and enact the relationship between environment, health, and disease in the regions of Eurasia, and how did these shape approaches to managing, protecting, building in, and transforming the physical environment? Who were the main actors participating in these processes?

Workshop program

Thursday, 1 June 2023

9:00-10:15 - THE BODIES OF HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS

Chair: David Roger Bannister (University of Oslo)

Claire Shaw (Warwick University): “Conceptualizing the ‘Useful Body’ in the USSR: Labour Capacity, Disability and the Influence of Environments”
Anna Toropova (University of Copenhagen): “Constitution or Environment? Iurii Kannabikh, Shattered Nerves and the Psychoneuroses of Revolution”
Iryna Skubii (Queens University): “Animals, Diseases, and More-Than-Human Dimensions of Famines in Soviet Ukraine”

10:30-11:45 - MULTISPECIES HEALTH AND DISEASE

Chair: Mingyuan Zhang (University of Oslo)

Anna Mazanik (German Historical Institute, Moscow): “Ticks, Humans, and the Soviet Project: Exploring the Environmental History of Tick-Borne Encephalitis in Eurasia”
Julia Malitska (Södertörn University): “Nutritional controversies in the fin de siècle Russian Empire: People’s Health, Dietary Reform and the ‘Meat Question’”
Susanne Bauer (University of Oslo): “Fallout and food webs from the ground up: multispecies legacies of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan”

11:45-1:15 - DISEASE ECOLOGIES

Chair: Nhung Lu (University of Oslo)

Einar Wigen and Ingrid Eskild (University of Oslo): “Plague’s Concepts of Europe”
Susan Jones (University Minnesota): “Donors and Recipients: Soviet Scientists’ Conceptualization of a Disease Reservoir on the Steppes, 1930s-1960s”
Clemens Günther (Freie University): “The Infectious Periphery: Pandemics and the (Post)Colonial Question in the Russian Empire”
Marek Eby (New York University): “Landscapes and Lifeways of Socialism: Malaria Ecologies of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, 1925-1939”

1:45-3:00 - MICROBIAL ENTANGLEMENTS

Chair: Ayse Nalan Azak (University of Oslo)

Dmitriy Myelnikov (Cambridge University): “‘The unbreakable bond between the organism and the environment’: Bacteriophage therapy as an ecological pursuit in Soviet Georgia”
Miriam F. Lipton (Oregon State University): “Better Together? Soviet Combination Antibiotic Therapy with Bacteriophages in the 1950s and 1960s”
Serina Tarkhanian (The Oslo School of Architecture and Design) and Corinne Aivazian (Terra Ancestral): “Healing Earths: Exploring remedial entanglements and materiality of Armenian clay”

3:15-4:45 - KEYNOTE

Chair: Johanna Conterio (University of Oslo)

Kate Brown (MIT): “Communist Bodies and Capitalist Bodies: What Radiation Medicine Tells us about Cold War Understandings of Ecological Health”

5:00-6:15 - THE HUMAN MIND IN TIME, SPACE, AND ENVIRONMENT

Chair: Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius (University of Oslo)

Chechesh Kudachinova (Mannheim University): “Emerek, Environment, and Colonialism: Exploring the Frontier of Mental Disorder in Northeast Eurasia, 1880s-1920s”
Matthew P. Romaniello (Weber State University): “The Question of Russia’s ‘Mixed’ Peoples: Linnaeus, the Academy of Sciences, and the Eighteenth-Century Taxonomic Project”
Ana Hedberg Olenina (Arizona State University): “Resonant Space: Kinesthesia and Immersive Experience in Sonorous Media Environments of Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Theremin”

Friday, 2 June 2023

9:00-10:15 - URBAN PLANNING, ARCHITECTURE, AND HEALTH

Chair: Nikhil Malik (University of Oslo)

Maria C. Taylor (Princeton University): “Plants at Plants: the Phyto-Mitigation of Industrial Hazards in Stalin-era Urbanism”
Zeynep Ece Sahin Korkan (Technical University of Munich): “Healing Landscapes: Women, Ecology, and Healthcare in fin de siècle Istanbul”
Anna Batzeli (Aristotle University): “Insufficient Water Supply Management and Typhoid Fever Outbreaks: a case-study from interwar Andros, Greece”

10:30-11:45 - MIGRATION, MOBILITY, HEALTH, AND ENVIRONMENT

Chair: Ingrid Eskild (University of Oslo)

Elena Vishlenkova (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies): “’Siberian health’ and ‘Caucasian longevity’: Soviet Bioregionalism in the 1970s-1990s”
Jo Laycock (University Manchester): “Refuge in an ‘Inhospitable Land’: Resettlement, Health and the Transformation of the Soviet Armenian Environment”
Ilana Kappanyos (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary): “Local Expertise: The Role of Hungarian Visiting Nurses in Locations and Accessing Patients”

12:15-1:30 - DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE

Chair: Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter)

Marin Coudreau (CERCEC, CNRS, Paris) & Laurent Coumel (CREE, INALCO, Paris): “‘Geohygiene’: A Soviet Precursor for a Science of ‘Global Health?’”
Sergei Mokhov (Liverpool John Moores University): “Soviet oncology in a trap of infrastructure”
George Andrei (Indiana University, Bloomington): “A Wild Country: Miasmas, Climate, and Health and the Emergence of Forestry in Romania, 1886-1910”

2:00-3:30 - TOXIC LANDSCAPES

Chair: Johannes Mattes (University of Oslo)

Marc Elie, CNRS (France): “Did the Soviet Union Collapse under an Environmental Health Crisis? Revisiting the Ecocide Thesis Thirty Years after”
Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland): “The Aral Syndrome: Health, Environment and the Retreat of Central Asia’s Aral Sea”
Tsz Ho Wong (University of Edinburgh): “Japan’s Pre-War Research on Chemical Warfare and Wartime Production of Related Weapons and Equipment”
Nicholas Breyfogle (Ohio State University): “Contaminated Waters: Debating the Meanings of Pollution at Lake Baikal”

3:30-4:45 - HEALING LANDSCAPES

Chair: Subhadeep Chowdhury (University of Oslo)

Temirlan Tileubek (University California, Davis): “Making New Soviet Children: Evgenii Radin and The Transformation of Childhood in Revolutionary Russia”
Slava Savova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum): “Atlas of Health: Hydrogeological Cartography and the Weaving of Healthscapes in Postwar Bulgaria”
Emma Friedlander (Harvard University): “Health and healing in the late Soviet ‘New Age’”

Contact details

Dr Johanna Conterio, conference convener

The event has been supported by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, UiO:Life Science, and KLIMER: Climate, environment and energy.

Bionic Natures Workshop

Join us online for the Bionic Natures x Digital Ecologies workshop on Friday April 21st!

Time and place: Apr. 21, 2023 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Klimahuset

The Bionic Natures collaboratory at the Oslo School of Environmental
Humanities, and the Digital Ecologies research group, are delighted to
welcome you to join us online for the Bionic Natures workshop on April 21st.

Bionic natures - broadly, natures known, transformed, augmented and
replaced by emergent (digital) technologies - are proliferating, raising an
open-ended series of questions and practical and epistemological challenges
to environmental scholars and practitioners. Digital technologies offer novel
opportunities for generating knowledges concerning the nonhuman world,
enabling encounters with previously inaccessible forms of life and ecological
phenomena, and potentially contributing to more just, equitable forms of
environmental custodianship. However, digital technologies, and the datadriven approaches they enable, can also be prone to glitching and malfunction,
give rise to new avenues for exploitation and marginalisation, and can entrench
relations of power embedded in market-based and technocratic responses
to environmental issues.

The Bionic Natures workshop seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum
for discussing these themes, bringing together researchers from the social
sciences and humanities, artists and creative practitioners, and private sector
actors driving digital transformations in environmental management.

Program

11:00 - 11:15 Welcome
11:15 - 12:45 Panel 1 - Towards Forensic Ecologies
- 11:15 - 12:15 Jasper Humpert, Lola Conte, Omar Ferwati
- 12:15 - 12:45 Discussion
11:15 - 12:45 Lunch break
13:30 - 15:00 Panel 2
- 13:30 - 13:50 Søren Enghoff
- 13:50 - 14:10 Adam Wickberg
- 14:10 - 14:30 Andra Pop-Jurj
- 14:30 - 15:00 Discussion
15:00 - 15:15 Break
15:15 - 16:45 Panel 3
- 15:15 - 15:35 Marianne Lien
- 15:35 - 15:55 Emil Henrik Flatø
- 15:55 - 16:15 David Ribes
- 16:15 - 16:45 Discussion

The event will be hybrid & a link to attend will be sent out on Digital Ecologies' mailing list on Friday.

Organizer

The Bionic Natures Collaboratory and Digital Ecologies

2022

Knowing Natures Eco-slam

Welcome to an exhibition with presentations, installations and performances by students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours Certificate!

Time: Dec. 2, 2022 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

About the event

The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities invites you to the Knowing Natures Eco-Slam, where students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours certificate (EHS) present their final projects, developed during the Knowing Natures course. Come explore the projects as they are presented through performance, image, text, sound and other installations.

Programme

10:00 - 12:00 Environmental Storytelling - Morning session. The students will present their projects. The presentations begin at 10.
- Erik Einum (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), Coffee Origins
- Jonas Kittelsen (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), Ecogrief: A Cry for help
- Thor Gustav Due (Geology), What does it have to do with me?
- Kaja Roa Ladstein (Museologi og kulturarvstudier), Make Yourself Comfortable: The Sublime Revisited
- Mari Hansgård (Political Science), Pollution is Colonialism
- Nazli Kuyucuoglu (Literature), Stories of Trash
- Mina Angeloff (Nordic studies), Una and Anjo in Femundsmarka
13:00 - 15:00 Environmental Storytelling - Afternoon session. The students will present their projects. The presentations begin at 13.
- Marit Bye Gjermshus (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), Making (a)mends
- Shaila Delos Reyes (Intercontextual Theology), 21 Days Challenge
- Johannes Fatland Skjeie (Informatics: design, use, interaction), The Pond: Rumors about local nature
- Laure Disson (Social Anthropology), First Flight
- Johanna Honsberg (Screen Cultures), Knowing Places
- Maja Gulliksen (Literature), Uncanny Natures
- Fredrik Angen (Middle East Studies), Robert Brun (Middle East Studies) and Trym Daniel Rødvik (Development, Environment and Cultural Change), Nature Boy
15:00 - 17:00 Vernissage. Bring your friends and family to discover and explore the different student projects. You can come and go at your own leisure.

Welcome!

About the EHS programme

Organizer

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities

Walkshop – Unruly Renegades

Many of a forest's vital processes happen beneath the soil, out of sight. However, their are clues to the clandestine collaborations between fungi and plants and animals. In this walkshop, natural historian and environmental photographer Alison Pouliot, takes us deep into the forest to discover its diversity, explore ideas and rethink fungus-forest lives.

Time and place: Oct. 19, 2022 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, Sognsvann, by the kiosk

About the walkshop

Many of a forest's vital processes happen beneath the soil, out of sight. However, their are clues to the clandestine collaborations between fungi and plants and animals. A fallen log provides a ‘forest archive’ of interactions. Each organism leaves its own ‘tracks and traces’ as well as hints as to how they interact. If we look closely we can see the workings of these organisms as they dismantle, recycle and convert wood to soil. This tuning to the interrelations between them provides a whole other way of thinking about and understanding the forest.

How do symbioses – or mycorrhizas as they are known – work and support soils and forests?

What other types of symbioses such as parasitism can we recognise and how do they also underpin healthy forests?

Forest ecosystems and their mycorrhizal networks also provide useful allegorical frameworks for re-imagining human societies. The decentralised nature of fungal mycelium can offer interesting insights for the emergence of new kinds of relationships and collaborations.

This walkshop takes us deep into the forest to discover its diversity, explore ideas and rethink fungus-forest lives.

If you want to prepare a bit for the workshop, you can watch a short six-part video series here called "The Forgotten Kingdom" (each video is only 4 or 5 minutes in length).

This workshop is the second of two event organised by the Anthropogenic Soils collaboratory and Alison Pouliot. The first event, Workshop & Foray - Dirt Matters, will take place on Tuesday, 18 October, from 12-17. Register here to join the workshop.

About the presenter

Dr Alison Pouliot is an ecologist, author and professional environmental photographer with a focus on fungi. Her work spans both northern and southern hemispheres ensuring two autumns and a double dose of fungi each year. Alison is actively involved in teaching, research and conservation, and has conducted over 700 fungus forays and workshops in a dozen countries over the last two decades. Alison is author of The Allure of Fungi, co-author of Wild Mushrooming, and her new book on fungi, Underground Lovers, will be published in March 2023.

Organizer

Anthropogenic Soils and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities.

Workshop and Foray: Dirt Matters

How do we maintain or restore the diverse functions and processes in soil that foster soil resilience and provide a buffer against climate-change induced changes? In this highly interactive and sensory workshop, natural historian and environmental photographer Dr. Alison Pouliot, provide an overview of the vital significance of fungi in soils.

Time and place: Oct. 18, 2022 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM, Room 120, Harriet Holters hus

About the workshop

We now know there is a greater biomass of living organisms within than above the soil. Modern industrial agriculture with its intensive use of chemicals, fertilisers and mechanical disturbance has largely eliminated these organisms. However, innovative and regenerative farmers are turning things around through 'ecological intensification' – that is, by fostering the organisms within soils with the aim to reduce fertiliser, irrigation and tilling practices. Central to these approaches is understanding how symbioses between plants, fungi and other organisms function.

How do we maintain or restore the diverse functions and processes in soil that foster soil resilience and provide a buffer against climate-change induced changes? In particular, how do we retain and rebuild the fungal ecologies that provide the frameworks, foundations and interconnectivities vital to functioning ecosystems?

This highly interactive and sensory workshop provide an overview of the vital significance of fungi in soils and the important roles they play in providing soil architecture, retaining water, increasing nutrient availability and maximising ecosystem resilience.

The workshop begins indoors around a specimen table becoming familiar with the wonders of the fungal kingdom. We then head to the forest to explore the role of fungus-plant-soil interactions especially in regard to soil restoration and remediation.

If you want to prepare a bit for the workshop, you can watch a short six-part video series here called "The Forgotten Kingdom" (each video is only 4 or 5 minutes in length).

This workshop is the first of two event organised by the Anthropogenic Soils collaboratory and Alison Pouliot. The second event, Walkshop - Unruly Renegades, will take place on Wednesday, 19 October, from 4-6pm. We will meet directly at Sognsvann, near the kiosk.

About the presenter

Dr. Alison Pouliot is an ecologist, author and professional environmental photographer with a focus on fungi. Her work spans both northern and southern hemispheres ensuring two autumns and a double dose of fungi each year. Alison is actively involved in teaching, research and conservation, and has conducted over 700 fungus forays and workshops in a dozen countries over the last two decades. Alison is author of The Allure of Fungi, co-author of Wild Mushrooming, and her new book on fungi, Underground Lovers, will be published in March 2023.

Organizer

Anthropogenic Soils and Oslo School of Environmental Humanities

Environmental Humanities Week

From 7 to 10 June, the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities cordially invites you to an "Environmental Humanities Week". With a series of events, we will celebrate the exciting work happening in the field, here at UiO, and beyond.

On 7 June, we will kick off the week with a public talk by Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen) on "Reason and Response-Ability" and panel discussion on "Reclaiming Sustainability" at Kulturhuset, Oslo.

On 8 and 9 June, we organise a PhD Researcher School on "Situated Research - Exploring Place and Time Through the Environmental Humanities", as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in the Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH).

On 10 June, we invite all interested to our Environmental Humanities Festival. The day will start with a Keynote Lecture by Professor Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford), followed by presentations of the OSEH Collaboratories, a pop-up exhibition, a music by the UiO choir, and more.

PhD Researcher School: Situated Research - Exploring Place and Time Through the Environmental Humanities

Time and place: June 7, 2022 – June 10, 2022, Oslo, Norway

Call for Applications: PhD Research Seminar on "Situated Research – Exploring Place and Time Through the Environmental Humanities"
Convenors: Ursula Münster and Pierre du Plessis
Organiser: Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), University of Oslo
Cofunding: Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH), as part of the NoRS-EH Module "Theories and Methods in Environmental Humanities"

Description

In the Anthropocene, a time of planetary environmental and climatic crisis, common understandings of place and time have become increasingly contingent. Ecologies all over the world are adjusting to new scales of disturbance, new assemblages of species, and shifting temporalities. Global climate change, for instance, affects the seasonal temporalities of plants, animals, and microbial life, threatening dangerous mismatches of timing within ecosystems. This disrupts cultural, economic and spiritual connections with environments and landscapes, with important sequences of events being disrupted or squeezed. It brings about new intensities that alter the compositions of ecological assemblages once associated with particular places, and new relations to and understandings of place emerge.

Capitalism and capitalist logics have exacerbated these transformations, not only increasing spatial homogeneity and prioritizing temporal decontextualization —as with both the industrial factory and plantation—in ways that materially shape environments. Moreover, they have also reoriented the temporal relations through which many peoples engage with place, away from a sensitivity and responsiveness to more-than-human temporalities. In this process of spatiotemporal displacement, it has become difficult to navigate between global challenges and local particularities, together with historical contingency and the immediacy of crisis that challenges liveability on the planet. These are issues that affect the ways in which we engage with our own research and research sites. As a result, it has become increasingly important for scholars to reconsider their research, by situating their thinking and ideas in relation to the sensitivities of place and time.

How can theories and methods in the environmental humanities lead to a deeper understanding of a place and time in the Anthropocene? How do we attend to situated political ecologies without losing sight of how other-beings story place, make their worlds, and shape people’s lives? How can scholars from a diversity of disciplines collectively cultivate their “arts of noticing” (Tsing) the timescapes of the places they live in and/or research? What do we gain from re-conceptualising time as relational, multiple, and multispecies? And how might place emerge as more than an exclusively human category through an attention to multispecies temporalities?

Our Researcher School, hosted by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of Oslo, will explore connections between place and time through diverse perspectives gathered by the environmental humanities. Facilitated by a group of scholars with a range of disciplinary backgrounds, we will focus on emplaced learning, research and teaching-methods through which we will engage with the situatedness of our research activities - be it the manifold, affective, bodily and multi-sensory ways of knowing involved or the act of writing itself.

Together, we will investigate how place-based learning techniques may help us engage with notions of space and time differently from, for instance, purely discourse-oriented types of analysis. What does a place-based approach to research reveal about how knowledge is constituted? How can we be more attentive to how nonhuman life forms make their worlds through different rhythms, co-ordinations and temporalities? How may we rethink connections between ‘data-collection’, ‘analysis’ and the act of ‘writing up’ our findings (conventionally portrayed as a linear process leading to research ‘outputs’)? And how may we encounter, conceptualise and engage with place, time, and temporality differently outside the ‘classroom’ by actively engaging in tasks and activities in the open?

The school will take place at various locations in Oslo, both indoors and outdoors, such as the Botanical Garden, the Oslo Fjord or the Akerselva River. 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 concepts of place and time in their own research, through a combination of place-based activities and writing exercises. They will also be expected to read preparatory texts in advance of the school which will inform the place-based activities and communal discussion during the workshop.

Programme

The Researcher School has different parts and combines workshop elements with public events:

7 June

Public evening event, “Reclaiming Sustainability? - A Conversation on Education and our Environmental Futures” at Kulturhuset, Oslo. Keynote by Tim Ingold (Anthropology, University of Aberdeen) on “Reason and Response-Ability”, followed by a podium discussion with Mette Halskov Hansen (China Studies and Co-rector of UiO), Britt Kramvig (Tourism and Northern studies, The Arctic University of Norway) Felix Riede (Archaeology, Aarhus University), and Heather Swanson (Anthropology, Aarhus University), moderated by Gro Birgit Ween (University of Oslo).

8-9 June

Place-based teaching and writing exercises in different parts of Oslo, such as the Botanical Garden, the Oslo Fjord or the Akerselva River. Modules will be led by an exciting group of scholars including: Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh/OSEH), Thom Van Dooren (University of Sydney/OSEH), Paolo Gruppuso (University of Aberdeen), Mette Halskov Hansen (University of Oslo), Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen), Helge Jordheim (University of Oslo), Britt Kramvig (The Arctic University of Norway), Eben Kirksey (Deakin University), Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford), Ursula Münster (Univesity of Oslo), Pierre du Plessis (University of Oslo), Heather Swanson (Aarhus University), Felix Riede (Aarhus University/OSEH) and Else Vogel (University of Amsterdam).

10 June

OSEH Environmental Humanities Festival with keynote by Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford) on: “The Probiotic Turn and the Green Rebranding of Cattle in the Anthropocene”, followed by presentations of the OSEH Collaboratories, a music performance by The Women’s Choral Society of the University of Oslo (Kvindelige Studenters Sangforening (KSS)), as well as presentations and a pop-up exhibition by UiO Researchers and students in the Honours Certificate in Environmental Humanities and Sciences (EHS).

Who can apply

Participants must be enrolled in a PhD program to join this course. You can attend at any stage of your project. Early-stage postdoctoral researchers and final stage master students may be accepted. All are welcome to apply, though first priority is given to applicants who are NoRS-EH members; membership is open to current PhD students based in Norwegian universities working with environmental humanities-related topics and methods. There is no fee to attend the course. 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.

Application details

This Researcher School is organised in cooperation with the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH). Places at the Researcher School are limited to 15 participants. In case you are interested in participating, please send a short CV (max. 2-pages) as well as an abstract (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 deadline for submissions is 20 March 2022. We will get back with a decision by 1 April 2022.

Please submit via email a single PDF document that includes the following:

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

Submit your application by 20 March 2022.

Facts about the course

Credits: 5 ECTS
Language of instruction: English
Registration deadline for accepted participants: 15 April 2022
Evaluation: Pass/Fail based on active and full attendance, and a piece of work to be sent within 30 days from the end of the course, which reflects over questions and themes raised during the PhD school. This can be a paper of max 1500 words (ref included), or a creative composition of text + images (photos, drawings, etc).

Environmental Humanities Festival

We invite you to our Environmental Humanities Festival where we celebrate the exciting work happening in the field here at UiO, in Norway, and beyond. The day will start with a keynote lecture by Jamie Lorimer, University of Oxford, followed by presentations by the OSEH Collaboratories, a pop-up exhibition, film screenings, a "green" choir performance, and more.

Time and place: June 10, 2022 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Georg Sverdrups hus

Program - Georg Sverdrups hus, Auditorium 1

09:00 – 09:15 Welcome & Opening, by Ursula Münster, Director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and Frode Helland, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities
09:15 – 10:15 Keynote Lecture, ‘The Probiotic Turn and the Green Rebranding of Cattle in the Anthropocene‘, by Jaime Lorimer, University of Oxford
10:15 – 10:30 Coffee Break
10:30 – 12:00 Lab Talks by OSEH Collaboratories, moderated by Kjetil Fallan, UiO
- Anthropogenic Soils
- Bionic Natures
- Critical Petroaestethics
- Curating Climate
- Fluid Dynamics
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 14:30 Lab Talks by OSEH Collaboratories, moderated by Hugo Reinert, UiO
- Media Seas of the High North Atlantic
- Monsters of the Anthropocene
- Playing with Deep Time
- Restorations
- Worlds of Meaning in Conversation
14:30 – 14:45 Coffee Break
14:45 – 16:00 Panel & Presentation by Students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours Certificate (EHS)
16:15 – 16:45 Green Entertainment by The Women’s Choral Society of the University of Oslo (Kvindelige Studenters Sangforening (KSS))
10:00 – 17:00 Pop-up Exhibition by UiO Researchers and EHS Students (Foyer and Seminar Rooms)

Environmental Humanities Week

This event is part of our Environmental Humanities Week. The event is also part of the PhD course organised as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH). The event is free and open to all! We look forward to seeing you!

The Probiotic Turn and the Green Rebranding of Cattle in the Anthropocene

A turn is underway in the probiotic approaches. Recalibrating modern antibiotic approaches and heading off their unintended consequences, the probiotic uses life to manage life, connecting the microbial with the planetary. This keynote lecture given by Jamie Lorimer gives critical insight into these interventions and their implications, and is part of OSEH's environmental humanities festival on the 10th of June.

Time and place: June 10, 2022 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM, Georg Sverdrups hus, Auditorium 1

About the event

The promise and pitfalls of this probiotic approach will be illustrated through the example of cattle. Cattle have been heavily implicated in global heating and the biodiversity crisis due to their high emissions profile and ecological hoofprint. Amidst calls for a dramatic reduction in the global herd, the livestock industry is rebranding cattle as tools for geoengineering capable of reducing methane, sequestering carbon in the soil, and rewilding ecologies. Through modifications to their internal and external metabolic profiles cattle are to be repurposed as planetary keystone species, modulating diverse earth systems to deliver ‘nature-based solutions’. The talk gives a brief flavour of these interventions and critically examines what the imply for the lives of cows, farmers and consumers in the Anthropocene.

About the presenter

Jamie Lorimer is Professor of Environmental Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His research explores public understandings of nature and how these come to shape environmental governance. Past projects have explored the histories, politics and cultures of wildlife conservation ranging across scales from elephants to the microbiome. Jamie is the author of Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (Minnesota, 2015) and The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life (Minnesota, 2020). His current research explores transitions in agriculture in the context of growing concerns about the relationships between farming, biodiversity loss and global heating.

Environmental Humanities Week

This event is part of our Environmental Humanities Week.

Reclaiming Sustainability? A Conversation on Education and our Environmental Futures

We invite to a conversation on the role of education in creating alternative environmental futures. Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen) will hold a public lecture at Kulturhuset on "Reason and Response-ability", followed by a panel discussion with Mette Halskov Hansen (UiO), Britt Kramvig (UiT), Felix Riede (Aarhus University) and Heather Swanson (Aarhus University). Moderated by Gro Birgit Birgit Ween (Museum of Cultural History, UiO).

Time and place: June 7, 2022 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM, Kulturhuset

The idea of sustainability, once a potent mobiliser for the global environmental movement, has lost its promise of vital socio-ecological change. Appropriated by and integrated into neoliberal, growth-oriented discourses and practices, it has become a hollow term for many. Decades of unsuccessful national and international efforts to combat climate change and biodiversity loss, make it obvious that a politics as usual that reduces the environment to an economic resource to be exploited is and has never been sustainable.

Yet, instead of abandoning the idea of sustainability, could we reclaim it, and fill it with new meaning? What are the diverse kinds of relations that we want to and need to sustain and care for in the Anthropocene? What role does education play in helping us to conceptualise, imagine and act towards vital environmental futures for the generations to come? And, what responsibilities do public universities, increasingly undermined by neoliberal values and economic interests, hold in creating life sustaining societies?

‘Reclaiming sustainability’ invites five speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds and universities to engage with these pressing questions. By providing creative and critical examples for and visions of university teaching and learning as transformational processes, the event will generate conversation about the role of education in creating generative and liveable environmental futures.

Program

17:00 – 17:15 Welcome and introductions by Ursula Münster, Director Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH)
17:15 – 18:00 Keynote, ‘Reason and Response-Ability’, by Tim Ingold, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
18:15 – 19:45 Podium discussion & Q and A
Mette Halskov Hansen (China Studies and Co-rector of UiO), Britt Kramvig (Department of Tourism and Northern Studies, The Arctic University of Norway), Felix Riede (Archaeology, Aarhus University) and Heather Swanson (Anthropology, Aarhus University). Moderated by Gro Birgit Ween (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
19:45 Drinks, music & informal discussions

Convenors: Ursula Münster (UiO), Pierre du Plessis (UiO) and Sara Asu Schroer (UiO).

Environmental Humanities Week

This event is part of our Environmental Humanities Week.

Organizer

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and LiVE: Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction

2021

Knowing Natures Eco-Slam

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

Time and place: Dec. 3, 2021 2:30 PM–7:00 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, Foyer. Click here to register.

The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities cordially invites you to the Knowing Natures Eco-Slam 2021, where students of the Environmental Humanities and Sciences Honours certificate present their research projects through performance, image, sound, and literature.

About the event

The Eco-Slam is an open exhibition hosted by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. EHS students will present their final projects, developed during the Knowing Natures course.

There will be performance, image, sound, and literature! All are welcome to this drop-in exhibition, with a program of presentations and performances as listed below.

You can come and go at your own leisure, even without registering.

The presenters and their projects

Anastasia Bertheussen - A Breathing Wreckage: A Photographic Essay investigating the Creatures living in and around a Plane Wreck at Hansakollen
Tarjei Brekke - The Riddle of the Steel Bees
Harald W. Bøe - Ecomorphosis - Poetic Urban Encounters
Ane Maria G. Døhl - The Nøkk in the Frogner River - Storytelling and Folk Music
Mari H. Einang & Vilde N. Hilleren - Folk Farming
Ingrid A. P. Ekelund, Emily P. Middendorf & Johannes H. Sletten - Heim Hage: Sowing Worlds One Seed at a Time
Ada W. S. Eldevik, Genver Quirino & Jonatan H. Røhme - Clashing Waves
Tiril Sofie Erdal - I rute
Merita Fjetland & Marte N. Thomassen - Cheap Food for Whom? An Exploration of Food Chains, Inequality and Environments
Rita Kovács - Asbjørnsen Got Lost in the Woods and So Should You: A Physical and Textual Hike Through Nordmarka
Simon O. Roy - Green Gifts: Everyday life and industrial expansions at the Port of Rotterdam
Thora B. Sandberg & Lisa H. Søyland - Pores Pearls Plastic: The Memory of Matter
Konrad K. Sandvik & Iva Svalina - Environmental Justice Litigation: What can we learn from Norway's experience?
Dina Skotnes - Approaching Responsibility: A Study of Norway´s Biggest Oil Companies
Sjur S. Strøm - River Restored? Perspectives on Urban Nature, Extinction, and Ecological Restoration after the Chlorine Leakage in Akerselva 2011

About the Honours Certificate in Environmental Humanities and Sciences

The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) aims to experiment with new forms of teaching in the Anthropocene. Through collaborative lectures, experimental seminars, and field excursions, students at the Honours Certificate will learn to better understand and address the environmental challenges of our times.

WEBINAR: Writing Multispecies Worlds: Graduate Workshop with Thom van Dooren

This workshop explore the writing of multispecies worlds. What are the challenges and possibilities of researching and narrating the ways of life of other species in their entangled, co-forming relationships? This is work that frequently raise difficult questions that are at once epistemological and ethical. The workshop will be led by writer and field philosopher Thom van Dooren.

Time and place: Oct. 13, 2021 9:00 AM–10:30 AM, CET. Register for webinar on Zoom.

Students will be asked to read/view four pieces of multispecies scholarship in advance of the class. Three of these items are listed below. The fourth should be selected by the student, ideally relating to their own research in some way. Students should come to class prepared to offer a two-minute reflection on their fourth (selected) reading, and some of the particular questions or opportunities that it raises in relation to writing multispecies worlds.

The event is limited to 15 participants. The event is catered primarily towards candidates of the Environmental Humanities Honours Certificate or Ph.D. researchers.

Reading/Viewing

Despret, Vinciane. 2021. “Phonocene: Bird-Singing in a Multispecies World.” RIBOCA2. (Video).
van Dooren, Thom. 2019. “Provisioning Crows: Cultivating Ecologies of Hope.” In The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds. New York: Columbia University Press.
Reinert, Hugo. 2019. “Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild.” Cultural Studies Review 25 (1): 29–40.
A fourth item of your choice (see above).

About Thom van Dooren

Thom van Dooren is a field philosopher and writer. He's an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia, and From 2020-2022, he is also a Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo, Norway. van Dooren has written several novels on multispecies lives and received the Society for Social Studies and Sciences' Fleck Prize of 2021 for his book The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia University Press 2019).

2020

Postponed: Workshop. Unworlding and Reworlding: Extinction, Extraction, Emergence

This workshop aims to re-story processes of extinction, extraction, and emergence in multispecies worlds.

Time: Aug. 9, 2020 9:00 AM–Aug. 12, 2020 4:00 PM

This workshop centres on ex-worlds; on unravelling, ending, and loss. How do these processes and their diverse violences take form in and through multispecies relationships? Conversely, how are diverse projects of resistance and renewal in the face of these processes themselves imagined and enabled by more-than-human entanglements? In short, what insights and resources might multispecies studies offer for better understanding the ending of worlds and for enacting alternative possibilities for life? What might attention to these contexts do to, or demand of, multispecies studies?

Multispecies Studies is an emerging area of interdisciplinary research grounded in the understanding that all of our lives are shaped and enabled by interactions with myriad, diverse beings, organic and inorganic. Multispecies work seeks to re-story processes of extinction and conservation, colonisation and climate change, resource production and extraction, to better reflect the inescapably entangled accountabilities, agencies, and vulnerabilities that shape necessarily (yet also unevenly) shared worlds. More than this, work in this area insists that to fully understand and engage these un/re- worlding processes, a serious engagement with the more-than-human is vital. At the heart of this approach is a commitment to an ontology, epistemology, and ethics of careful attention to the lives and worlds of others, grounded in field research that is in sustained conversation with the social and natural sciences, Indigenous knowledges, and a diversity of other ways of knowing.

The attendance of this workshop is by invitation only.

POSTPONED: Workshop - Teaching Across Disciplines in the Anthropocene

This workshop brings together scholars, students and administrative staff at the University of Oslo to envision ways of transforming university education in the age of the Anthropocene.

Time and place: Apr. 23, 2020 3:00 PM–6:00 PM, PAM 425, P. A. Munchs hus, Blindern campus.

Responding directly to demands of the climate-change generation, as well as to UiO's 2030 strategy, of building a more sustainable university, this workshop aims to discuss concrete ways of establishing interdisciplinary education in a time of ecological and climatic crisis. We will address questions like:

What should an Anthropocene curriculum look like?

Can there be one or must there be several curricula lines (e.g. specializations in research, communication, action, etc.)
What are the theories, epistemologies and methodologies needed for doing meaningful and impactful research in the Anthropocene?
Can we teach across disciplines without losing disciplinary depth?
Given that solutions likely rest in inter- or transdisciplinary research, what are the core skills needed for Anthropocene scholars to work well in such teams?
What institutional changes and administrative flexibilities are needed?
How to include interdisciplinary pedagogies as well as experimental and public-facing teaching to address the ecological and climatic crisis?

The workshop will be divided in two parts. The first part will be an open discussion on why and how education should be transformed in an era of ecological and climatic crisis. The second part will feature short impulse presentations by scholars with previous experience in interdisciplinary environmental teaching and experimental pedagogy. We will then discuss concrete examples of transformative teaching experiments at UiO and other institutions.

Please contact us if you are interested in attending the workshop: ingar.stene@ikos.uio.no

The workshop is organized by Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), in collaboration with OSEH Professor II Felix Riede, University of Aarhus.

2019

Nordic Environments: Opening Conference of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities

How can academics, artists and activists creatively engage with the environmental challenges of current times? How to imagine more just, livable and democratic futures in the Nordic countries?

Time and place: Nov. 1, 2019 10:00 AM–8:30 PM, SALT, Langkaia Oslo

The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities celebrates its official opening on 1 November 2019 at SALT, a nomadic art space located at Oslo’s harbor. We invite you to join our conference and an evening of celebration with environmental interventions from artists, activists and environmental practitioners who live and love the environments of the North.

The event features both a daytime conference with a keynote talk and panel discussion, as well as the evening program "Interventions" with short performances and a concert. The event is open to all, but participation in the daytime program requires registration. No registration is needed to participate in the evening program.

Full program

Daytime program
10:00 – 10:30 Arrival and Coffee
10.30 – 11:00 Welcome and Introductory Words
11:00 – 12:00 Keynote Talk
Heather Swanson (Aarhus University): “Worldly Humanities: Engaging landscapes of inequality"

12:00 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 15.00 Environmental Humanities of the Global North: Panel Discussion
Marco Armiero (KTH Stockholm)

Dolly Jorgenson (University of Stavanger)

Britt Kramvig (The Arctic University of Norway)

Julia Leyda (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

15:00 End of daytime event
Evening program
17:00–17:45 Interventions I
Mads Pålsrud: “Designing for Positive Urban Change”

Elin T. Sørensen and Elisabeth Sjødahl: “The Inner Oslofjord: Underwater Urbanity”

Zane Cerpina: “The Anthropocene Cookbook”

17:45 – 18:15 Break
18:15 – 19:00 Interventions II
Janike Kampevold Larsen: “Mineral Time in the Arctic”

Andreas Randøy: “The Climate Lawsuit”

Kirsty Kross: “Green Fish Show”

19:00 – 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 Concert
Vassvik: "Sápmi Joik & Modern String"

20:30 – Open ended celebration

Venue

The conference will take place at Langhuset, SALT. SALT is a nomadic art project with pyramidal constructions called “hesjer”, which are based on traditional coastal construction methods. SALT was first erected on Sandhornøya in Nordland in 2014 and the project has since visited Bergen and is now in Oslo until 2020 when the journey continues to the north. The pyramidal structures have been developed in collaboration with architect Sami Rintala.

Funding

The event is partly funded by the Oslo European Green Capital 2019.

Workshop: Curating climate - Museums as ‘contact zones’ of climate research, education and activism

How do we narrate climatic change in a museum environment and initiate dialogue across its stakeholders? How can museums become ‘contact zones’ where science and education, activism and entertainment, debate and tourism interact productively?

Time and place: Oct. 28, 2019 9:00 AM–Oct. 29, 2019 4:00 PM, Oslo, Norway

The workshop took place at The Natural History Museum, the site of the new Climate House (Klimahuset).The event is organized by the Curating Climate Collaboratory funded by Oslo School of Environmental Humanities as a long-term collaboratory research project. The international workshop has received additional support from UiO Energy and Heritage Experience Initiative.

The workshop explored the emerging, dynamic and transgressive field of the ‘climate museum’, tracing a unique and highly interdisciplinary space of encounter that connects the sciences and the humanities, academic and public spheres, research and action. The international workshop hosted four keynote speakers and six different sessions with total of over 20 presenters.

For enquiries please contact Bergsveinn Thorsson.

Description

Description
How do we narrate climatic change in a museum environment and initiate dialogue across its stakeholders? How can museums become ‘contact zones’ where science and education, activism and entertainment, debate and tourism interact productively? Various cultural institutions have recently taken up the challenges of communicating climate change and engaging with their communities. They range from established museums to new, emerging and experimental spaces. All attempt to promote debate and tell the stories we desperately need to connect scientific results to human lifeworlds.
Climate change is a complex phenomenon that crosses the register of nature and culture. Its ecological, cultural and technological impacts connect the global and the local. The importance of addressing climate breakdown in a global perspective reflecting the different challenges facing different regions makes museums revisit their collections, exhibition designs and expert networks as well as develop their cross-societal appeal. Under these challenging terms, they could provide a readymade infrastructure for climate change communication and co-creation as spaces for the intersection of climate research, dissemination and activism.

What are the competences museums need to develop in order to engage with the multiscalar and complex phenomenon? Do we need new institutions or are established museums capable of rethinking their approaches and use their resources to foster understanding and action to engage with the global environmental crisis? Should the focus be on the sustainable development goals, the Agenda 2030, climate change or even the Anthropocene?

Organizer

Prof Brita Brenna (University of Oslo), Prof Dominik Collet (Oslo School of Environmental Humanities), Torkjell Leira (Klimahuset Oslo), Morien Rees (ICOM’s working group on sustainability), Bergsveinn Thorsson (University of Oslo).

Workshop: Arts of Coexistence

Arts of Coexistence: Care and Survival in the Sixth Extinction

Time and place: May 2, 2019 9:00 AM–May 3, 2019 4:00 PM, Tøyen Hovedgård

Workshop of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), University of Oslo (UiO), coorganised by the Working Group HOLB (Humans and Other Living Beings) of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA).

Purpose

Recognising that our planet has entered a time of immense ecological devastation, this workshop invites papers that work creatively with the concept of care. The workshop explores diverse forms of care across differences that people develop (or fail to develop) in the context of species disappearance. How are ways of coexistence threatened, erased but also still maintained in time of the sixth extinction? Specifically, we are interested in work that conceptualises and explores skills, practices and ideas of care in multispecies, interspecies and more-than-human contexts. In addition, we invite research that reaches beyond ideas such as species and organic life, to encompass also practices of care for land and landscapes, for ecosystems, for machines, infrastructure, the dead, spirits, concepts, history and the past, the future, for the world itself.

Topics

Papers may address topics such as intervention, sustainment, maintenance, repair, collaboration, remediation, restoration or survival. What forms of care are the chaos and violence of the present moment calling forth? What are their limits? What are their risks and dangers, their potential for destruction? How does care travel, how may it be transposed to novel objects, settings and domains? How is care undone, destroyed, eradicated – and how can it be restored? How can we as researchers root our practice, and our commitments, in forms of care that do justice to the future? What are the possibilities of more-than-human care?

The complexities of hope and care

The workshop especially calls for stories of hope, of people finding ways to care for other beings, to help them survive and to survive with them, forming new connections and relations. Hope is complicated, however, and “care” can mean many things. We therefore also invite papers that refract and problematise the idea of care, perhaps finding it in unexpected, problematic or hard-to-think contexts: from the care invoked in technoscientific practices like de-extinction and geoengineering, to the rituals of remembrance that emerge for extinguished species, to the “care” of the coloniser for the colonised.

The disciplinary scope of the workshop is open, encompassing anthropology as well as cognate disciplines such as human geography, cultural studies, history of science, science and technology studies, sociology, media studies, archaeology and so on. We also welcome artists and other practitioners whose work engages with the topics of the workshop, and who are interested in contributing through performance, installations, photography etc.

Program

See the full program from the workshop here.

Participation and deadlines

If you are interested in participating, please send a title and abstract (500 words) to coexistence.care@gmail.com by 28 February 2019.

Draft papers must be pre-circulated to participants by 15 April. There may be some limited funding available for EASA members for travel and accommodation costs, please let us know if you require this.

Published Mar. 4, 2025 12:18 PM - Last modified Aug. 6, 2025 1:46 PM