Ursula Koy

• Koy, Ursula; Plessis, Pierre Louis du; Caple, Zachary & Schroer, Sarah Asu (2026). Multispecies Landscapes. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. ISSN 2514-8486. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this special issue, we gather contributors from across the world who develop a variety of approaches to the study of multispecies landscapes. The issue builds on ongoing dialogues between research hubs in the environmental humanities and social sciences, notably: University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Oslo, the University of Sydney, University of Cape Town, Aarhus University, and the University of Tromsø. Across these hubs, a shared interest in landscape has emerged, one that builds on earlier insights from the field of multispecies studies that took single species as an opening into a world of relations. As with Donna Haraway’s famous study of human-dog relations, the contributors in this special issue trace the implosions of nature and culture through which landscapes take shape:: “In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complexity is the name of our game.” Haraway 2003, 16). While these groups and individuals have developed their own distinct conceptual insights and methodological trajectories, a shared interest in the significance of landscape has emerged as a key node of inquiry, in which individual species are not the primary object of analysis, but rather serve as guides into the complex dynamics of multispecies landscapes.

• Koy, Ursula & T.R., Suma (2026). Soilscapes: Making and Unmaking Below-Ground Worlds with Earthworms. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. ISSN 2514-8486. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Taking the mass death of earthworms in 2018 as a critical event in the political-ecological history of Wayanad, Kerala, South India, this paper has four aims. First, by following the stories of dying earthworms, this paper points to the pivotal role that soils play in the multispecies ecologies that all life depends on. Second, the paper expands the concept of a landscape to a “soilscape”. The paper shows that a soilscape is not static, but a process, an interconnected, more-than-human community in motion. The soilscape emerges as a multi-species community and a radically interconnected living process that requires human care and is experiential only through intimate attentiveness and participation. Third, the paper recognizes that the decline of Wayanad's soilscape—highlighted by the mass death of earthworms—is rooted in Wayanad's politicalecological history and is not simply a symptom of the planetary climate crisis. The paper conceptualize the soilscape as a “landscape’s memory,” as interactions between the “anthroposphere, biosphere, geosphere” as an archive of political ecology manifested in the manifested in the “human-natural” body of soils (Richter, 2012). We present Wayanad’s political ecology from the belowground up, analyzing how the region’s history of colonial resource extraction and monoculture, of capitalist, chemical dependent cash-crop agriculture, and of reductive scientific experiments to solve the crisis of soil and agriculture, have materially affected the soilscape. Finally, the paper argues that what we call intimate attentiveness is necessary for knowing and living in a multispecies soilscape.

• Robin, Libby; Wells, Amanda; Leal, Claudia; Baço, Joana; Brito, Cristina & Carvalho, Patricia [Vis alle 12 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Transdisciplinary Histories and the Rise of the Environmental Humanities. Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History. ISSN 1973-3739. 18(1), s. 138–172. doi: 10.3828/whpge.63837646622515. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Münster, Daniel; Münster, Ursula & T.R., Suma, (2025). Frontiers, Encounters, Metabolism: A Material- semiotic Approach to Fields and Forests in the Western Ghats. I Sudha, Vasan, (Red.), Environmental Studies from India: Engaging with the Planetary Ecological Crisis. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198984115. s. 243–262. doi: 10.1093/9780198984115.003.0017. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In environmental studies of South Asia and beyond, fields and forests have mostly appeared as separate domains of policy and study. Agrarian studies, peasant studies, and agro- ecology (Mohanty, 2016) have developed largely independently of and with little dialogue with environmental histories of forestry, conservation, and environmentalism (Sivaramakrishnan, 1999; Gadgil & Guha, 2000; Agrawal, 2005; Vasan, 2006). This article challenges the conceptual and scholarly divisions between fields and forests by focusing on the material semiotics of their contact zone— where the political ecologies of agriculture, forestry, and conservation meet.

• T.R., Suma & Koy, Ursula (2025). Becoming Elephant: The Relational Personalities of Arikomban, Kalloor Komban and Soorya in South India. Humanimalia. 16(1), s. 205–256. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.23831. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper presents the stories of three Asian elephants — Arikomban, Kalloor Komban, and Soorya—who live in a landscape of conflict, coexistence, survival, and captivity in the Western Ghats of South India. The stories of the three elephants give insights into what it means to “become” an elephant in different anthropogenic settings: in a mosaic forest landscape, in captivity at the elephant camp, and as a trained kumki (working) elephant who serves the forest department fighting against his conspecifics and mitigating so-called Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC). Our paper engages with what we call “relational personalities”, the individual and personal characteristics of elephants acquired throughout their life in contact and in close relationship to people. The article aims to acknowledge the personal histories of elephants in interaction with people and the knowledge and skills they have developed to survive in a mosaic forest landscape. Elephants have changed as individuals and as a species in the Anthropocene, and they endure hardships and violence when living close to people. Living near people and in human lifeworlds as well as among other elephants in a dynamic environment has shaped their habits, ways of being, and emotions — what they love, desire, dislike, fear, feel angry or joyful about. Arikomban, Kalloor Komban, and Soorya teach us that in order to better understand contemporary elephants, and facilitate their survival in non-captive settings, we need to recognize them as individuals with personalities situated in spatial and temporal history, politics, and trauma. Although shaped by interactions with people, elephants actively create their lifeworlds and respond to their environments and human contact in a variety of ways.

• O'Gorman, Emily; Dooren, Thom Van; Münster, Ursula; Adamson, Joni; Mauch, Christof & Sörlin, Sverker [Vis alle 23 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2019). Teaching the Environmental Humanities: International Perspectives and Practices. Environmental Humanities. 11(2), s. 427–460. doi: 10.1215/22011919-7754545. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critical engagement with some of the key challenges and opportunities that are emerging in EH teaching, centering on how the field is being defined, shared concepts and ideas, interdisciplinary pedagogies, and the centrality of experimental and public-facing approaches to teaching. The final part of the article offers six brief summaries of experimental pedagogies from our authorship team that aim to give a concrete sense of EH teaching in practice.

• Münster, Daniel & Münster, Ursula (2012). Human-Animal Conflicts in Kerala: Elephants and Ecological Modernity on the Agrarian Frontier in South India. RCC Perspectives. ISSN 2190-5088. doi: 10.5282/rcc/6157. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Münster, Daniel & Münster, Ursula (2012). Consuming the Forest in an Environment of Crisis: Nature Tourism, Forest Conservation and Neoliberal Agriculture in South India. Development and Change. ISSN 0012-155X. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01754.x. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Münster, Ursula; Eriksen, Thomas Hylland & Schroer, Sara Asu (2023). Responding to the Anthropocene: Perspectives from Twelve Academic Disciplines. Scandinavian Academic Press. ISBN 9788230403624. 340 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The Anthropocene - the era of humans - refers to a time when humanity has left its indelible stamp on the planet, including its geology and biogeochemistry. Understanding the Anthropocene, where the risk of irreversible and catastrophic ecological damage looms on the horizon, is a daunting task and solutions seem to be difficult to come by. What we offer in this book consists of fifteen perspectives on the Anthropocene written by scholars with backgrounds in over a dozen academic disciplines - archaeology, biology, geology, cultural history, literature, art history, science and technology studies, anthropology, political ecology, geography and law. Together, they offer tools enabling us to grasp the Anthropocene as a multifaceted phenomenon that requires attention from across the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities. Unlike most academic texts, these chapters are written in a personal and engaging style indicating not only that the Anthropocene is a worthy subject of scholarly attention, but that its implications are existentially important to the authors, who are not just researchers, but also global citizens.

• Zehmisch, Phillipp; Münster, Ursula; Zickgraf, Jens & Lang, Claudia (2017). Soziale Ästhetik, Atmosphäre, Medialität. Beiträge aus der Ethnologie. LIT Verlag. ISBN 9783643139115. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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• Koy, Ursula (2026). Soil Justice: Political Ecologies of Degradation and Repair. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Soil degradation is not simply an ecological process. Soils become depleted, contaminated, displaced, and destroyed through particular histories of industrial agriculture, extraction, pollution, urbanization, and unequal access to land. At the same time, soils are living multispecies worlds, continuously made and remade through relations among humans, plants, animals, microorganisms, water, and climate. What, then, would it mean to approach the current soil crisis as a question of justice? This paper develops the concept of soil justice as a way of bringing political ecology into conversation with more-than-human approaches to justice, care, and repair. Soil justice asks how the harms and benefits associated with soils are distributed, whose knowledge and practices of soil-making are recognized, and who is able to participate in decisions about soil futures. But it also extends questions of justice beyond human communities by asking what responsibilities humans have toward soils as living ecologies. Drawing on research from the Anthropogenic Soils project, the paper explores how histories of soil degradation intersect with practices of soil care, restoration, and regeneration. Rather than imagining justice as a return to an untouched or purely “natural” soil, I argue for understanding soil justice through the ongoing work of making and maintaining flourishing soilscapes. This shifts attention from soil as a resource to soil as a set of relationships—and from restoration alone toward questions of responsibility, care, and the possibilities of living well together in damaged landscapes.

• Koy, Ursula (2026). Anthropogenic Soils: Transdisciplinary and multispecies approaches to sustainable futures. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Human survival depends on the invisible and still largely unknown world below our feet. Yet soils across the planet are being depleted, contaminated, compacted, and lost through industrial agriculture, extraction, pollution, urbanization, and climate change. Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human–Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet responds to this global soil crisis by asking how understanding the histories through which soils have been transformed can help us imagine and cultivate practices of soil repair and regeneration. The project starts from a simple but consequential proposition: soils have always been anthropogenic. Humans have shaped soils for millennia through cultivation, irrigation, burning, composting, manuring, extraction, and other forms of labour and care. Rather than treating soils simply as natural resources or passive victims of human disturbance, we approach them as dynamic nature-cultures and living multispecies worlds, continuously made and remade through relations among humans, plants, animals, microorganisms, water, climate, and geological processes. Led by the environmental humanities, our multidisciplinary team investigates the political ecologies and histories through which soils have become depleted, toxic, or lost, alongside technologies and practices of soil repair in landscapes affected by industrial agriculture, radioactivity, waste, and toxic substances. From South Asia to Norway and the Arctic, we combine fieldwork and perspectives from environmental humanities, anthropology, science and technology studies, microbiology, and science fiction with experimental collaborations involving artists, curators, and practitioners. By bringing histories of degradation into dialogue with histories and practices of soil-making, care, and regeneration, Anthropogenic Soils explores what kinds of human–soil relationships can contribute to flourishing soilscapes and more sustainable futures.

• Methi, Hilde; Vaage, Nora Sørensen; Klutsch, Cornelya; Bauer, Susanne; Münster, Ursula & Flo, Annike (2025). Jordsamtaler. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Jordsamtaler belyser jord fra flere ulike kunnskapsfelt: filosofi og kunsthistorie, vitenskapsog teknologistudier, miljøhumaniora, biologi og kunst. De som bidrar er forskerne Nora S. Vaage, Susanne Bauer, Ursula Münster og Cornelya Klutsch, i tillegg til kunstner Annike Flo og kurator Hilde Methi, som er ansvarlige for dette kunstverket og programmet.

• Münster, Ursula (2024). Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human-soil relationships on a Troubled Planet. doi: https:/hdl.handle.net/11250/4856625. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This paper presents the multidisciplinary research project Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human-soil relationships on a Troubled Planet, based at the University of Oslo as a collaborative experiment for studying soils in the Anthropocene. The project studies the ways people in different parts of the world have invented, practiced, and imagined ways of recuperating soil health. We argue that soils need to be conceptualized not as natural resources to be exploited, but as anthropogenic, as lively and dynamic natural-cultural composition responsive to human recuperation and healing. The project combines studies of repairing contaminated, toxic, and depleted soils in different parts of the globe –from South Asia to Norway and the Arctic –as well as artistic and multimedia research into the ways in which Indigenous writers and artists offer alternative modes of relating to soils, and for building possible future of earthly survival. Closely collaborating across the humanities, social sciences arts and life sciences, SOILS combines ethnographic, multispecies and praxiographic methodologies with speculative and artistic research to generate new knowledge about emergent human-soil relations.

• Münster, Ursula (2024). Anthropogenic soils: collaborative environmental humanities of soil recuperation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Environmental Humanities scholars experiment with creative forms of collaboration for studying anthropogenic landscapes and sites. What do the environmental humanities have to contribute for studying the repair of soils after contamination and depletion though toxic substances, radioactivity, or post- Green Revolution agriculture? How can scholars work together across the sciences, humanities and arts, to find ways of recuperating soils that are eroded, toxic or radioactive. What forms of collaboration are needed beyond the university to make an impact? How to meaningfully include activists, artists and the wider public?

• Münster, Ursula (2024). Soil transformations: Theories and practices of soils in the Anthropocene. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The soil humanities suggest redefining soils as both multispecies compounds receptive to human care and as polluted, toxic, or dangerous environments. We explore the implications of these new understandings of soils in the worlds of STS research, multispecies ethnography, activism, science, and art.

• Münster, Ursula (2024). En ny jord er mulig https://www.apollon.uio.no/artikler/2024/2_jord_innledning. [Internet]. Apollon. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  En ny jord er mulig Fruktbar jord blir ødelagt eller forsvinner i raskt tempo over hele verden. Mennesker i mange lokalsamfunn utvikler nå metoder for å reparere og tilbakeføre.

• Münster, Ursula (2024). Collaborative Environmental Humanities of Soil Recuperation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Environmental Humanities scholars experiment with creative forms of collaboration for studying anthropogenic landscapes and sites. What do the environmental humanities have to contribute for studying the repair of soils after contamination and depletion though toxic substances, radioactivity, or post- Green Revolution agriculture? How can scholars work together across the sciences, humanities and arts, to find ways of recuperating soils that are eroded, toxic or radioactive. What forms of collaboration are needed beyond the university to make an impact? How to meaningfully include activists, artists and the wider public?

• Münster, Ursula (2024). PhD Workshop: Anthropogenic Soils. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This interdisciplinary PhD course introduces participants to the environmental humanities of soils. Soil demands a transdisciplinary approach and, as a matter of nature-culture in the Anthropocene, has become a key interest to the humanities. As a group of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – archaeology, art history, arts, biology, design, environmental humanities, philosophy, social anthropology, STS – we will organize this place-based PhD course to find different ways of approaching human-soil relations in the Arctic. Human survival depends on the invisible and largely unknown world below our feet. The slow pace of "natural" soil creation processes (pedogenesis) justifies a perspective on fertile soils as a limited non-renewable resource, like coal and oil. Planet Earth has reached "peak soil", that is the point at which we are destroying soil faster than it can recover. Moreover, precarious, contested, and post-conflict livelihoods remain largely disconnected from conversations on more-than-human health based on microbial and metabolic thinking. Soils are not just endangered—they are also becoming dangerous. Contaminated by chemicals and radioactive substances, some soils pose a threat to more-than-human health. Further, soils' weakened ability to store organic matter—the result of extractive land use and global warming—means that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other climate gases are being released, accelerating the climate crisis. Yet, in the Anthropocene, soil is not only a natural resource that is rapidly exploited, polluted, and overused, it is also "anthropogenic" in the sense that it is responsive to human care, it can be manipulated, healed, and repaired. Its ontological conditions further complicate soil protection paradigms – instances of soil memory (eg heritage soils) or soil personhood (eg rights to nature legislation) do not always align with other quantifiable factors of soil health such as soil organic carbon or nutrient availability. Participants will spend five days together with our multidisciplinary team at a research station in Pasvik, Northern Norway, to engage with human-soil relationships of the region. Activities include joint site visits, lab visits, artistic interventions, lectures and collaborative writing and research exercises.

• Münster, Daniel & Münster, Ursula (2023). Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Soils are central for our understanding and responses to the contemporary environmental crisis. The survival of all terrestrial life, including human life, depends on the availability of healthy living soils. In the Anthropocene, soils are among the ecosystems critically affected by industrial and agricultural land uses. While the thin layer of planetary topsoil has formed over millennia, our soils are increasingly shaped and affected by human (anthropogenic) activity: These include multiple forms of soil degradation and erosion through chemical contamination, radioactivity, and the loss of nutrients, but also practices of soil care. Working with soil for millennia, human communities have developed a great diversity of technologies for enhancing, cleaning up, and restoring soils for food production, and after natural and technological disasters.   In this talk, we present the environmental humanities led project “Anthropogenic Soils” that studies the ways people in different parts of the world have invented, practiced, and imagined ways of recuperating soil health. We argue that soils need to be conceptualized not as natural resources to be exploited, but as “anthropogenic”, as lively and dynamic natural-cultural composition responsive to human recuperation and healing. The project combines studies of repairing contaminated, toxic, and depleted soils in different parts of the globe – from South Asia to Norway and the Arctic – as well as artistic and multimedia research into the ways in which Indigenous writers and artists offer alternative modes of relating to soils, and for building possible future of earthly survival. Closely collaborating across the humanities, social sciences arts and life sciences, SOILS combines ethnographic, multispecies and praxiographic methodologies with speculative and artistic research to generate new knowledge about emergent human-soil relations.

• Eriksen, Thomas Hylland; Münster, Ursula & Schroer, Sara Asu (2023). Introduction; Responding to the Anthropocene. I Münster, Ursula; Eriksen, Thomas Hylland & Schroer, Sara Asu (Red.), Responding to the Anthropocene: Perspectives from Twelve Academic Disciplines. Scandinavian Academic Press. ISSN 9788230403624. s. 9–36. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The Anthropocene - the era of humans - refers to a time when humanity has left its indelible stamp on the planet, including its geology and biogeochemistry. Understanding the Anthropocene, where the risk of irreversible and catastrophic ecological damage looms on the horizon, is a daunting task and solutions seem to be difficult to come by. What we offer in this book consists of fifteen perspectives on the Anthropocene written by scholars with backgrounds in over a dozen academic disciplines - archaeology, biology, geology, cultural history, literature, art history, science and technology studies, anthropology, political ecology, geography and law. Together, they offer tools enabling us to grasp the Anthropocene as a multifaceted phenomenon that requires attention from across the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities. Unlike most academic texts, these chapters are written in a personal and engaging style indicating not only that the Anthropocene is a worthy subject of scholarly attention, but that its implications are existentially important to the authors, who are not just researchers, but also global citizens.

• Barth, Theodor & Münster, Ursula (2022). "Wheeling" environmental humanities— Educating designers in excess of what designers do. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  If—on our present horizon—design appears as environmental humanities gone live, education must be a key player in hatching and cultivating the awareness of this possibility. If—on our present horizon—design appears as environmental humanities gone live, education must be a key player in hatching and cultivating the awareness of this possibility. Presently field investigations in the design education at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) are linked to public culture in different visual areas featuring surfaces, spaces, objects and the human body taught in three different study areas: graphic design & illustration, interior architecture & furniture design, clothing/fashion & costume design (presently clustering in areas of artistic research). The theory curriculum of the MA programme opens for investigations in a broad sense: making—pace Tim Ingold—as field-investigations gone live. As our notion of the ‘field’ is becoming entangled with the environmental situation, the grounds of a discipline with a theoretical provenance in humanities are shifting, in the sense that design is environmental humanities gone live. An agenda for a reflective practice of making turned to environmental responsivity. To activate video, please click slide number six. Utgiver: OSEH

• Pooley, Simon; Linnell, John Durrus; Münster, Ursula Margarete; Dooren, Thom Van & Zimmermann, Alexandra (2022). Editorial: Understanding Coexistence With Wildlife. Frontiers in Conservation Science. 3. doi: 10.3389/fcosc.2022.830971. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Münster, Daniel & Münster, Ursula (2021). Pharmaceutical Care: Diclofenac, a Pharmacon of More-Than-Human Health. Cultural anthropology. ISSN 0886-7356. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Münster, Ursula; Dooren, Thomas Francis van; Schroer, Sara Asu & Reinert, Hugo (2021). Introduction: Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction. Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights. doi: https:/www.culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Münster, Ursula; Dooren, Thomas Francis van; Schroer, Sara Asu & Reinert, Hugo (2021). Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction. doi: https:/www.culanth.org/fieldsights/series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Münster, Ursula; Furuseth, Sissel & Lilleslåtten, Mari (2020). Frykten for klimaendringer speiles i kulturen. [Internet]. IKOS UiO Aktuelle forskningssaker. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Nustad, Knut Gunnar; Lien, Marianne Elisabeth; Flikke, Rune & Münster, Ursula (2019). Project opening and film screening: an aquatic antropocene? The domestication of fish and rivers. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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