Environmental Humanities
The research group brings together an interdisciplinary group of research faculty and PhD students with an interest in environmental issues.
Main content
Our research encompasses a vast range of human interactions with the physical world, from ancient migration to contemporary climate resilience.
The Environmental Humanities research group is an interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars in the fields of history, archaeology, cultural studies, linguistics, literature, media studies, political science, social anthropology, science and technology studies, and beyond. Its composition reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field of environmental humanities, which bridges the divide between the natural sciences and the humanities, as well as that between the academy and society, by applying humanistic methods and modes of thought to environmental subjects.
Our research encompasses a vast range of human interactions with the physical world, from ancient migration to contemporary climate resilience. Please see individual members’ profiles and biographies for further details on our research interests, affiliations, and areas of expertise.
Course package in Environmental Humanities
The Environmental Humanities group is currently developing a package of courses, united by a common theme, to help guide students interested in pursuing further studies in the field. This package will include core training in Environmental Humanities as well as topical courses on Blue Humanities, environmental ethics, climate history, and more. To register your course as part of the package, or to submit a suggestion for a new course, please complete this form. Further information for students will be provided once the package is finalized
Programme 2024/2025
| November 28 14:15-16:00 | Grant Application Workshop, Marit Ruge Bjærke: crisis as environing technology Paper will be circulated in advance. |
| December 5-6. | Writing retreat, Winter 2024 Thursday, Dec. 5 8:08 AM Depart Bergen via train 9:17 AM arrive Voss; coffee and snacks 9:30 Introductions and goal-setting for the day 13:00-14:30 Work Session 2 14:30-15:00 Optional coffee break 17:00-19:00 Free time (possible excursion) 19:00 apertif and shared reflection on writing progress 19:30 Dinner
Friday, Dec.6
8:00-8:30 Breakfast 8:30-10:30 Work Session 4 10:30-10:45 Optional coffee break 10:45-12:00 Work Session 5 12:00-13:00 Check out and lunch 13:00-14:00 Reflections on writing and future collaborations 14:06 Depart Voss via train 15:24 Arrive Bergen |
| December 17 9:15-12:00 | Hedda Susanne Molland, Sluttseminar (Master Class): “Catching the Present: From CO2 handling to the low emission society”. In her PhD project, Hedda Susanne Molland investigates the temporal relationships of climate change politics. Approaching this topic from the perspective of environmental humanities, in general, and cultural studies in particular, she argues that a supposed failure of the imagination in the face of climate change should not lead us to neglect the important role that imagination plays in political plans for achieving imaginaries such as a low emission society. The way such political plans are temporally signified and configurated – from experiences, to present circumstances, on to expected effective measures and onwards to hopes for successful solutions, or perhaps the other way around – is highly imaginative. In recognizing that both the low emission society and CO2 handling are temporally configured product of imagination, Molland asks in her dissertation what role imaginaries play in political plans and vice versa, and specifically what this chiefly temporal relationship looks like in political documents. The primary analytical objective in the dissertation is therefore to investigate how temporal configurations connect political plans and policies with cultural and technological imaginaries. |
| January 23 12:15 | Brown bag lunch talk by Elizabeth Fairhead, Department of Foreign Languages: “The Rare Franklinia and the story that made it a symbol of the extinction crisis.” |
| March 5 14:15-16:00 | Talk by local researcher Liubomira Romanov “Integrating Archaeological, Historical, and Biological Data to Uncover the Past of the Yakuts (Eastern Siberia, Russia)” Yakutia is the coldest region in the Northern Hemisphere, with record winter temperatures below -70°C. The Yakut people’s ability to adapt to such extreme cold has been key to their survival. They are thought to descend from an ancient population that migrated from their original homeland in the Lake Baikal region following the Mongol expansion between the 13th and 15th centuries AD. Originally, they led a semi-nomadic lifestyle centered on horse and cattle breeding, which provided transportation, clothing materials, meat, and milk. Early Russian colonization in the first half of the 17th century AD, followed by further expansion, profoundly impacted the indigenous population. Among other effects, Russian conquest led to significant socio-economic and cultural changes. For 15 years, the French Archaeological Mission in Eastern Siberia (MAFSO) has excavated and studied over 150 bodies preserved in Yakutia’s permafrost. The exceptional preservation of tombs and biological remains, along with historical and ethnographic documents from the post-colonial period, enables interdisciplinary research combining social science and biological methods to explore the transformation of Yakut society and culture. |
Selected Projects
Group members engage with scholars from around the world with support from the European Research Council, the Norwegian Research Council, and other major funding entities. The following is a partial list of ongoing projects.
HABITABLE AIR
Principal investigator: Kerry Ryan Chance
This project addresses the under-analyzed relationship between three urgent issues: (1) the rapid growth of urban inequality; (2) the amplification of political divisions in major democracies; and (3) the increasing impact of pollution and global warming. The project uses qualitative methods – including ethnographic participant observation and the analysis of historical archival documents – at a scale that only quantitative studies of climate change have yet achieved by working within a clear network of scientists, policymakers, workers, and residents in transnational sites. Through major publications, teaching and training, a documentary film, policy briefs, media outreach, public workshops, and an international symposium, the project will produce actionable knowledge to build cooperation between the public, governments, and marginalised communities.
Read more: Habitable Air
VOICES OF NATURE
Principal investigator: Birger Solheim
“Voices of Nature” is an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which texts of an activist-political, legal, and literary nature create meaning within ecological and environmental discourses. A main question will be related to how one can describe/motivate a transition from an anthropocentric to a geocentric/ecocentric way of thinking. A fundamental assumption is that such a transition presupposes that we must take nature (animals, plants, landscapes, water, air, etc.) into account as actors, as something/someone we depend on and are interconnected with. In this way, nature can increasingly gain a right to co-determination/to have a voice, which then manifests in various types of texts. This can be seen in different narratives, concept constructions, semantic oppositions, and so on.
Project participants, who are members of the LINGCLIM research group, plan to submit a FRIPRO application to the Research Council of Norway (NFR) during 2025.
SEATIMES: How Climate Change Transforms Human-Marine Temporalities
Principal investigator: Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme
The SEATIMES project explores the implications changes in marine ecosystems have for people whose lives are closely entangled with life below water. Through comparative ethnographic work among Senegalese artisanal fishers, in the whale watching industries of Norway and Portugal and in the lobster fisheries in Maine, US, the project investigates the ways in which transformations in the mobilities and seasonal rhythms of life in the sea shapes human-marine relations. What happens to coastal communities and people’s relations to the sea and its life forms when marine species start to move in unprecedented ways? Focusing on the temporal aspects of these relations, the SEATIMES project aims to develop a new multispecies marine anthropology that can better account for how humans and marine life become entangled in new ways through changed temporal orientations, multispecies rhythms and temporal practices.
Read more: The SEATIMES Project
THE LAST WORKSHOP: Latin America and the End of the World
The Last Workshop: Latin America and the End of the World
In barely three decades, reports about the state of the world went from the euphoric “end of history” to the rather gloomy “end of humanity”. In between, globalization exerted an unprecedented pressure on natural resources, accelerating the Anthropocene, and tested local political and social arrangements. The last workshop analyses the manifold ways in which the idea of the end of the world materialized in Latin America. It is a conversation about different ends of different worlds in the social, cultural, natural, economic, historic and labor realms.
CALENDARS
CALENDARS: Co-Production of Seasonal Representations for Adaptive Institutions
Principal investigator: Scott Bremer
The CALENDARS project empirically explores the ways people perceive and effect seasonal patterns in different communities and fields of activity, focusing mainly on places in New Zealand and Norway. A central concern is how peoples’ cultural calendars of seasons can support or hinder their adaptation to rapid changes in seasonal rhythms, through climatic but also other environmental and social changes. The overall objective of the project is to advance knowledge and understanding of how seasonal representations shape and are shaped by institutions, and to critically appraise the quality of these representations for contributing to successful adaptation to seasonal change.
Read more: Project webpage
CLIMLIFE
CLIMLIFE: Living with climate change: motivation and action for lifestyle change
Principal investigator: Kjersti Fløttum
The CLIMLIFE project studies how Norwegian citizens relate the challenges of climate change to their normal, day-to-day life choices. As part of this project, researchers from linguistic, media, political and natural sciences conduct surveys and use multiple tools of language analysis to develop knowledge about how Norwegians are confronting – or failing to confront – the realities of our changing climate.
Read more: Project webpage
GARDENING THE GLOBE
Gardening the Globe: Historicizing the Anthropocene through the production of socio-nature in Scandinavia, 1750–2020
Principal investigator: Kyrre Kverndokk
This project is an interdisciplinary and international research project exploring the historical processes through which nature has been conquered, controlled and commodified in Scandinavia during the last 250 years. Its principal objective is to examine the relationship between Western modernity and the emergence of the Anthropocene by exploring the historical processes that have led to the Anthropocene as an increasing intensification of attempts to conquer, control and utilize nature. The project hosted an international conference at UiB in the spring of 2022 and participants are working on multiple publications. Beginning in the spring of 2023, the Gardening the Globe project holds a reading group open to members of the research group.
Read more: Project webpage
RESEARCH SCHOOL IN ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
The Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH)
Contact: Kyrre Kverndokk
In cooperation with NTNU, UiA, UiO and UiS, the Environmental Humanities research group runs the Norwegian Research School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH). The research school was created as a transdisciplinary initiative meant to strengthen the Norwegian humanities' contribution to environmental research and the large, global challenges the world is facing. Every other August, the Environmental Humanities Research Group organizes and runs a course on climate research for PhD candidates who are members of the research group as well as for international participants. The final cycle of this course will take place in the fall of 2024 and will focus on the theme of “More-Than-Human Humanities.” Further information can be found here: More-Than-Human Humanities
Read more: Researcher school webpage
SEACHANGE
Quantifying the impact of major cultural transitions on marine ecosystem functioning and biodiversity
Contact: Ramona Harrison
Ocean conservation is a global concern, but researchers say we don’t currently know what the oceans were like before major impacts caused by humans. Using sediments, shells and bones, and a host of cutting-edge analysis techniques, the SEACHANGE project aims to find out. The interdisciplinary project will test the scale and rate of biodiversity loss as a result of fishing and habitat destruction over the last 2,000 years in the North Sea and around Iceland, eastern Australia and the west Antarctic Peninsula, as well as the earlier transition from hunter-gatherer to farming communities in northern Europe around 6,000 years ago. The project will discover how depleted the current marine environment is, what measures are needed to help biodiversity to recover, and how long this might take.
Read more: Project webpage
Past events
4.sept | PhD workshop: Anthropology of Sound With Professor Andrew Whitehouse (University of Aberdeen) Room: 9th floor, Social Sciences faculty (or outside, weather permitting) Organisers: Sadie Hale & Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme How does paying attention to sound affect one’s orientation to their environment? What noises are being made and lost at a time of climate change, mass extinctions, and urbanisation? How can anthropologists and other scholars become more sonically sensitive in our own work? Interest in aural approaches in anthropology is growing, from well-established concepts such as Steven Feld’s (1992) ‘acoustemology’, or sonic way of knowing and being, to more recent scholarship such as ‘listening to the zoo’ (Rice et al. 2021), connecting a region through radio (Western 2023), and the ongoing use of methodologies like soundwalks. This workshop aims to stimulate discussion around such approaches, in order to help to expand our sensory apparatus and unsettle the visual mode so dominant in the ‘participant observation’ method. The workshop will be led by Andrew Whitehouse from the University of Aberdeen. Andrew is an environmental anthropologist researching nature conservation, landscape, and human-bird relations. He conducted the AHRC-funded Listening to Birds project with Tim Ingold, which considered the ways that people relate to birds through sound |
5.sept | Romain Grancher, From shores to abyss: an environmental history of the seabed |
| 8. Oct | Gardens: A Workshop Participants: Nils Haukeland Vedal, Birger Solheim, Knut Mikjel Rio, Vigdis Broch-Due, Olaf Haraldsøn Smedal, Scott Bremer |
21. oct | Half-day workshop: Multi-Sensory Workshop This will be organized as a half-day workshop of 3-4 hours where we will explore how we (can) use and emphasize different senses - hearing, touching, seeing, walking, smelling etc - both methodologically and analytically in our research. Those who want can bring some material for discussion, either on something they have written concerning senses in their research, empirical material, or other ideas they want to explore. It is organized as a transdisciplinary workshop as part of the research groups Methodological and Empirical Questions and Environmental Humanities at AHKR. Researchers from cultural studies, history, religious studies and social anthropology will attend, and it is open to researchers from other relevant fields as well. |
| 24. Oct 14:15 - 15:00 | Marjo Juola: The intersection of nature, culture, and the environment - highlighting the uncanny and ‘weird’ aspects of post-industrial and Anthropocene heritage Room: Seminarroom 1, Øysteinsgate 3 |
| 28-31. Oct | Four-day PhD Course, More-Than-Human Humanities Room: Semonarrom 1, Øysteins gate 3 |
| 31. Oct 14:15 - 16:00 | Karin Lillevold, Unruly Fluffy Cows and Shy Reindeer. The Spectacle of Wilderness and Multispecies Relationalities in Dovrefjell. |
1. nov | Oceanic encounters symposium Organisers/presenters: Edvard Hviding, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, Sadie Hale (Oceans Research Group at UiB Department of Social Anthropology) Format: 3 x 20-minute talks (incl. visual media/films) + panel discussion Tea and coffee will be served! Oceanic Encounters is a half-day symposium dedicated to exploring these questions, through ethnographic storytelling about physical encounters with large oceanic lifeforms. |
23-24 May | Final workshop, The Last Workshop: Latin America and the End of the World |
15-16. Feb | Presentation of short film "The Bonding", by artist Michelle Letelier, and conversation with Letelier and Martin Lee Mueller (University of Oslo, author of Being Human Being Salmon). Presented by The Last Workshop: Latin America and the End of the World |
29-30 jan | Research Group Retreat, Norheimsund |
