Environmental Humanities

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

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.

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

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 

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

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 

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 

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

The distinction between nature and culture has been a predominant trait of modern Western thought. This sharp divide is also articulated in many scientific disciplines, knowledge practices and institutions such as the museum. In the museum sector the distinction between museums of natural history and art and culture historical museums affects how collections are maintained, communicated and made subject to research.

NAMUS will explore how this worldview is articulated in practice and what consequences the division of the world in nature/culture have for museums in the Anthropocene as natural and cultural history becomes more tightly interwoven and reciprocal. Using the consolidated museums in Vestland county as starting point, NAMUS seeks to explore what alternative modes of thinking and practices are present in the museum landscape in Western Norway through coastal cultures, boat building traditions and the built environment of the agricultural and industrial society alike.

Read more: Project webpage

Principal investigator: Marit Ruge Bjærke 

INVISEA is an interdisciplinary project, based in the humanities and social sciences. The project examines the knowledge base and values that shape decision-making about Norwegian seabed areas today and develop new critical tools and research interventions that can bring forward a larger plurality of stakeholder knowledges and values in the future. We focus on two types of seabed areas that are contested with regard to area use in Norway: kelp forests and areas considered eligible for deep sea mining. Although very different in terms of physical factors and legal status, these are both subject to different sector interests and important in terms of biodiversity and climate mitigation.

Read more: Project Webpage