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 his research
My doctoral research project is an ethnography of common grazing in parts of Norway’s outfield mountain landscapes. Conceptually, I suggest that ethnographic attention to the practice of common grazing offers a new way of understanding how animal lives and landscapes are made and remade, understood, and governed. Through the analytical lense of common grazing, and beginning with the large agricultural restructuring in the 1950’s in Norway, I demonstrate how animals and landscapes are made and remade in encounters between the industrial and traditional, the urban and the rural, the “domesticated” and the “wild”, the “cultural” and the “natural”. This dissertation will be an important contribution to environmental anthropology based on an ethnographic and political ecological approach to common grazing in Norway, and how the practice is affected in surprising and unexpected ways that also situate multispecies relations and histories.
The doctoral project is supervised by Associate Professor Ursula Münster (main supervisor), and Associate Professor Tom Bratrud (co-supervisor).