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Marit Ruge Bjærke

Marit Ruge Bjærke

Position

Researcher, Cultural Studies

Affiliation

E-mail
marit.r.bjerke@uib.no
Phone number
+47 55582204
+47 92 80 18 52
Visitor address
Øysteins gate 3
5007 Bergen
Postal address
P.O. Box 7805
NO-5020 Bergen
Norway

Marit Ruge Bjærke

Position

Researcher, Cultural Studies

Affiliation

Research groups

Short info

My research interests lie within the environmental humanities, with three main areas of interest: 1) environmental policy and politics, 2) environmental temporalities, and 3) understandings of nature and biodiversity, with a special focus on underwater nature.
Research

My research interests lie within the environmental humanities, with a focus on biodiversity loss, climate change, temporal understandings, and invasive alien species. I am especially interested in how different environmental problems are understood and presented in political texts, mass media and popular science, and how understandings of different environmental problems intertwine. My background is in marine biology (phd), history of ideas (master), and cultural studies (postdoc).

I am currently part of the project Gardening the Globe: Historicizing the Anthropocene through the production of socio-nature in Scandinavia, 1750-2020, which started up in December 2021. The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway. As part of the project, I explore the management of so-called "invasive alien species" - species that have been moved by humans to places where they do not occur naturally. I examine how authorities navigate the tension between stopping an ecological threat and developing an economic resource, and how different scales and scalings - such as species versus strain - are used. I also examine what kind of valuation of nature eradication of alien invasive species entails.

From 2017 to 2021, I was part of the project The future is now: Temporality and exemplarity in climate change discourses. Here, I explored how the relationship between climate change and biological diversity is conveyed in mass media and popular science.

Publications

Selected publications (complete list below)

Books

Bjærke M.R. & K. Kverndokk 2022. Fremtiden er nå: Klimaendringenes tider. Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press.

Kverndokk, K., M.R. Bjærke & A. Eriksen (eds.) 2021. Climate Change Temporalities: Explorations in Vernacular, Popular, and Scientific Discourse. London: Routledge. Series: Explorations in Environmental Studies.

Book chapters

Bjærke M.R. 2022. Little Red Ring Binders: Early Red List Temporalities. In: A. Ekström & S. Bergwik (eds.). Times of History, Times of Nature: Temporalization and the Limits of Modern Knowledge. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 128-152.

Bjærke M.R. 2021. The Sixth Extinction: Naming Time in a New Way. In: K. Kverndokk, M.R. Bjærke & A. Eriksen (eds.). Climate Change Temporalities: Explorations in Vernacular, Popular, and Scientific Discourses. London: Routledge. 125-140.

Bjærke M.R. 2021. Living the climate change. In: K. Kverndokk, M.R. Bjærke & A. Eriksen (eds.). Climate Change Temporalities: Explorations in Vernacular, Popular, and Scientific Discourses. London: Routledge. 179-184.

Bjærke M.R. & K. Kverndokk 2021. “Our world is dew”: Tor Åge Bringsværd’s Fable Prose as a Chthulucenic Exploration. In: C. Trenter & A. Høglund (eds.). The Enduring Fantastic: Essays on Imagination and Western Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 140-153.

Articles

Bjærke M.R. 2020. Miss Hare Struggles: How Examples of Species Threatened With Extinction Tell a Story of Climate Change. Ethnologia Scandinavica 50: 187-202.

Bjærke M.R. 2019. Making Invisible Changes Visible: A Minister, a Cuckoo and the Mediation of a Red List. Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research 11 (3-4): 394-414.

Svensen H.H., M.R. Bjærke & K. Kverndokk 2019. The Past as a Mirror: Deep Time Climate Change Exemplarity in the Anthropocene. Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research 11 (3-4): 330-352.

Lecture
Academic lecture
Book review
Academic article
Chapter
Academic monograph
Academic chapter/article/Conference paper
Academic anthology/Conference proceedings
Popular scientific article
Museum exhibition
Editorial
Feature article
Doctoral dissertation

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Projects

I am currently part of the interdisciplinary project "Gardening the Globe: Historicizing the Anthropocene through the production of socio-nature in Scandinavia, 1750-2020”, which is funded by the Research Council of Norway. I am part of the project management and lead the thematic work package "Moving nature".

GARDENING THE GLOBE aims to examine historical processes through which nature has been conquered, controlled and commodified in Scandinavia from the mid-18th century to the present. Today's environmental problems are often presented with the help of scientific concepts from Earth Systems science and geology - such as the term Anthropocene. Although such concepts are important for highlighting humanity’s impact on the planet as a whole, they also seem to make factors such as historical conditions, social structures and cultural values​​ invisible. There is therefore a need for a broader understanding of how the practices and technologies that have led to today's environmental problems are historically situated. GARDENING will study these historical processes as a series of increasingly intense attempts to conquer, control and utilize nature - that is, the production of what we call "socio-nature".

The project will investigate cases related to three themes: 1) processes of moving animals, plants and minerals; 2) practices of eradicating organisms; and 3) the human production of landscapes. The cases include management of alien species, the use of rotenone in Scandinavian rivers, the concept of “nature's economy”, Danish pig farms, Swedish mining landscapes, urban gardening, “the green shift”, and man-made geological land formations.

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From 2017 to 2021, I was part of the project The future is now: Temporality and exemplarity in climate change discourses.