/sadie_headshot.jpg)
Drawing on experience as a whale-watching guide, fieldwork in both Norway and the Azores, and earlier projects on sharks, energy history, and queer literary studies, Sadie brings to OCEH a rich interdisciplinary practice. She also convenes the course Ocean Anthropology in Bergen and co-hosts the podcast Anthropology on Air.
Below, she shares more about her background, her inspirations, and what she’s working on while in Oslo.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research!
I research human-whale relations through tourism encounters, mostly in the Norwegian Arctic. For my PhD fieldwork, I worked as a whale watching guide across four seasons in the towns of Andenes and Skjervøy. I'm broadly interested in animals, especially large marine animals, and the kinds of stories and meaning-making processes they can prompt - whether related to climate change, or the ethics of interspecies relations. I'm also interested in how the different senses, especially listening, are engaged by those who work with whales.
Before my PhD, I researched North Atlantic shark hunting and its entanglement with energy history. I wrote about the Greenland shark, which can live to be around 500 years old, and the way nuclear weapons testing partly enabled its longevity to become legible to scientists. Such a long-lived animal can provoke a radical rethink of temporal scales in the Anthropocene, bringing into contact timescales of geology, vertebrate life, industry, and extinction. I also researched basking shark hunting in the Hebrides, resulting in the artistic collaboration CAIRBAN (with Miriam Sentler). Before that, I studied literature and gender studies, with an interest in queer masculinities. So I've been meandering through different disciplines and themes for some time, before landing in anthropology for my PhD!
What brings you to OCEH?
I've been an admirer of OCEH ever since its inception, back when I was still a master's student, and have followed your activities from afar and whenever I've been in Oslo. I'm delighted to be a guest researcher here, in addition to being hosted at the Social Anthropology Institute (SAI) at UiO. I'm part of the environmental humanities group in Bergen as well, and it's nice to see what you get up to in Oslo and to see where we can maybe collaborate and learn from each other. I'm inspired by the variety of events you have going on here.
What will you be working on while you're here?
Mostly I'll be writing up my PhD dissertation, under the co-supervision of Marianne Lien at SAI. I'll also be taking part in some writing groups and attending events hosted by OCEH and other departments at UiO. I'm hoping to do a few interviews for Anthropology on Air, a podcast I co-host (with Sidsel Marie Henriksen). I plan to make the most of being in the capital by visiting lots of museums, and perhaps try to get better at cross-country skiing once the snow comes!
What's your favourite thing about working in the environmental humanities?
When teaching, I can see that there is so much interest in environmental themes from a social perspective, but many students don't realise there is a name for that. What I love about environmental humanities is the way it legitimises that interest, opening up literary, social, and creative approaches. It also brings us social scientists and humanities scholars into dialogue with natural scientists, which I find important. I think this guards against getting too comfortable within one disciplinary mindset, because you're always aware that there are different angles from which to look at a given issue.
We’re delighted to have Sadie as part of our research community and look forward to the conversations, collaborations, and oceanic insights her work inspires.
Learn more about Sadie and her research here.