The project is a collaboration with the Center for Museum Studies and with the research community associated with the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of Humanities, and Vitenparken.
To comment on the candidates work, we have invited Dr. Colin Sterling at the University of Amsterdam.
The mid-term evaluation is organized in two parts and starts with a 2-hour public seminar, followed by a closed meeting.
The purpose of the evaluation is to assess the progress of the PhD project at a point when it is still possible to make small or substantial changes. In general, we want to know how the candidate is doing, how much work is done, and what is left.
About the PhD candidate and her research
We humans have radically changed the Earth’s ecosystems and soils are amid global and local crisis, suffering from accelerating degradation due to intensive farming, deforestation, urbanization and soil sealing. Environmental humanities, like science, has the potential to function proactively and contribute to problem solutions. With this doctoral project, we build a bridge between environmental humanities and museology at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo, and Vitenparken Campus Ås, a knowledge and experience center for food, environment and climate issues.
Thinking with soils, I question what role exhibitions can play in raising people’s awareness of soils, and how we can curate transformative exhibition experiences? As part of my doctoral degree, I have visited soil exhibitions across Northern Europe. I have stood in the middle of a room filled with colourful soil profiles from around the world in the Dutch World Soil Museum; I have listened to over a hundred digital recordings from the underground in Switzerland; I have dressed up as mushroom hyphae in a soil performance in a former prison outside Copenhagen, climbed through a cave of flying roots and explored an earthworm ambulance.
The different soil realities unfold in the exhibitions, based on who contributes to the curatorial projects, from soil scientists, farmers, anthropologists, artists, designers or architects. The exhibitions I research combine art and science, and they are curated in very different ways. Yet they have much in common, as they all want to change human-soil relationships. To better understand the soil exhibitions, I analyse curatorial approaches and emphasize hospitality, (time)scales, the affective and the sensory.
My supervisors are Professor Brita Brenna and Associate Professor Hugo Reinert. Co-supervisor is Jun.-Prof. Dr. Alexandra Toland