Purpose
The Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities (OCEH) is a response to the profound challenges that global environmental change poses to the university as an institution and for humanities scholarship.
On a radically destabilised planet, faced with new and urgent demands, the university must find new grounds for its social contract. The same applies to the humanities, which now need to adapt to the significant changes in how we perceive the Earth and its environment.
The critical reflection that is the hallmark of academic work remains as crucial as ever, if not more so, but there is no longer the luxury of time. Reflection must unfold concurrently with the doing—and it must be done in collaboration with others, with a shared recognition of the challenges we face.
What we do
OCEH is a platform for interdisciplinary, humanities-led environmental research, funded from 2024 to the end of 2028 by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo.
Our aim is to generate new research, new perspectives and new approaches that can engage directly and creatively with the complex, multidimensional problems of the environmental crisis.
Through our Environmental Humanities Lab we provide a space for collaborative research, events, teaching, dissemination and outreach—connecting researchers, students and practitioners at the University of Oslo to each other and to partners, stakeholders, communities and networks beyond the university.
Our work builds on the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH), a previous strategic initiative funded by University of Oslo from 2019 to 2023.