UiS has won funding for at project that combines outreach in museums with sustainability education.
The University of Stavanger has won funding for the project «Into the Fjords: Blue Museums as Arenas of Learning about Vulnerable Ecosystems (FJORDS)». The project has received funding of 6 million kroner from The Research Council of Norway and will run from 2026 to 2029. FJORDS, which is led by Associate Professor of History and Greenhouse-member Marie-Theres Fojuth, is a collaboration between 8 partners from the museum sector and academia.
This research project will investigate which educational and curatorial methods can contribute to increased environmental awareness in different groups of museum visitors, and especially with caring for marine ecosystems in mind. Fojuth explains:
"Despite political guidelines and ambitions, many museums are unsure about how they can communicate about sustainable development in a concrete manner. For example, we can see that there is little dialogue across the traditional subject boundaries, like between natural and cultural history. The complex challenges of sustainability demand interdisciplinary competence: including scientific knowledge, historical awareness and understanding of systems."
Communicating knowledge about the ocean has proven to be particularly challenging. Life in the ocean is not directly visible to us; it is unknown and appears strange and different. Most people have what has been called “terrestrial bias” – a systematic, biased interpretation of the world made with both feet firmly planted on land. Such a bias includes a risk that we do not understand and value, and therefore do not prioritise, the world’s largest and most vulnerable ecosystem.
Museums offer a unique opportunity to strengthen 'ocean literacy' – one of UNESCO'S priorities in education and lifelong learning.
The FJORDS-prosjekt will carry out case studies about museum outreach on, beside and in fjords, specifically Engøysund near Stavanger, the Oslo Fjord and Varanger Fjord. Fjords are gateways to the world: they are sea routes to other regions and cultures, but they are also places where environmental changes happen because of industry, shipping, settlement and waste management, which all enter the global ocean-cycle. In a similar manner, fjords are also affected by environmental and climate changes that have their origin a long way from them. Invasive species that have arrived with shipping threaten the fjords' ecosystems – for example, the sea squirt species 'sea vomit' (Didemnum vexillum), which was first found in Engøysund, Norway, in 2020.
"Fjords are, in other words, a fantastic starting point for putting the vulnerable ocean on the museum agenda,” says Fojuth, “With the FJORDS project, we want to contribute perspectives from the humanities and the cultural sector to the UN Decade of Ocean Science (2020-2030).”
The FJORDS project-team consists of The University of Stavanger and three of Norway's largest museum groups: The Museums in Akershus, Museum Stavanger and og Østfoldmuseene. In addition, the project will collaborate with Engøyholmen Coastal Cultural Centre, Varanger Museum, the Norwegian museum-network for sustainability, International Council of Maritime Museums (ICMM) and Institut für Museumsforschung Berlin. Principal Investigator Fojuth is a member of The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities and The Sustainable Futures in Education (SuFu), and is the coordinator of the Museum Pedagogy study programme at the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities. Several of the partners on the FJORDS-project actively contribute to the professional development in museums project "SAMBA - Active collaboration for sustainability communication in museums" (2024-2026), financed by Kulturdirektoratet. You can read more about the Østfold Museums' contribution to the project in their press release (in Norwegian).