Information about our current research projects and research networks
Research projects
PITCH: Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage sector in the context of green transitions (2023-2027)
PITCH brings together academic and cultural sector organisation partners in six countries to spur on the processes by which humanities and arts scholarship and public interventions can strengthen citizen engagement with the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and its relationship to past and present petrocultures to lay the groundwork for rapid, society-wide European green transitions away from a reliance on fossil-fuels. Dolly Jørgensen is the lead on the project, which is funded by the EU Horizon Europe program and UK Research & Innovation.
Good Fire: An Environmental History of Prescribed Burning in Norway and the North (2023-2027)
The Good Fire Project examines the history of prescribed fire in Norway and the boreal north. The project asks whether fire suppression accurately characterizes twentieth-century landscape management practices and traces the roots of modern mega-fires to a complex collection of landscape management practices extending well beyond wildfire prevention policy. Good Fire examines the history of prescribed burning in the Norway and the boreal north, including Scandinavia and northern Canada. Using historic climate and wildfire data, archival evidence, imagery, and popular accounts, this project will assemble a history of human interaction with fire over time. Although climate change has exacerbated wildfires, Norway and other boreal states arguably have an accumulated fire history that can inform the present. Good Fire frames fire as part of a long and dynamic relationship with combustion which has changed over time in response to social, political, and economic forces. The project is led by Charlotte Wrigley and is funded by the Research Council of Norway's FRIHUMSAM programme.
DigiFREN: Digital Aestheticization of Fragile Environments (2022-2025)
The historically and ethnographically grounded research of DigiFREN will elucidate digital aestheticization in/of fragile environments, namely, how are digital media and technology implicated in reframing environmental perceptions, affections, conceptions, and practices. DigiFREN is the first ethnographic project to undertake a large-scale, comparative study of the topic in a digitalising Europe. It expands established methodological strategies and introduces the experimental method of senso-digital walking. Finn Arne Jørgensen is a partner on this project, which funded through the CHANSE program.
Nation of Mechanics: Animality and Indigeneity in American Automotive Culture (2023-2025)
With Nation of Mechanics, Daniel Bowman examines fiction by Indigenous American authors of the late twentieth century for literary representations of animals, automobiles, and the natural environment. NOMECH develops a novel approach to reading the road journey in American fiction (a genre which has historically excluded Indigenous writers) by centring Indigenous stories in which the environment is frequently presented as a character in and of itself, in contrast to the colonial tendency to personify the cars and ignore the living nonhuman world under the wheels. Combining approaches from literary studies and the environmental humanities, NOMECH explores the extent to which Indigenous American authors present counter-narratives to the colonial story of automobility in which human contact with the natural environment is defined by driving over it: moving from a relationship based on dominance, conquest, and subjugation to one which places more emphasis on mutually beneficial ways of living with other animals and technology. The project is funded by the EU Horizon MSCA PF 2022 programme.
Weathering Colonial Calcutta: Climate, Cultures and Everyday Experiences of the Weather, 1800-1945 (2023-2025)
With Weathering Colonial Calcutta, Animesh Chatterjee explores an urban, material and cultural history of colonial Calcutta as a story of changing ideas about, and everyday experiences of the weather. The project offers critical insights into the differential and multi-layered interactions between scientific knowledge-making and literary production of the weather, and also reveals everyday experiences of the weather as cultural acts infused with meanings that were socially constructed and historically specific. It highlights a culturally and spatially specific way of tracing not just what the effects of the weather were, but also how people felt and lived, thereby mobilising historical research and writing to enrich public engagement with climate change. The project is funded by the EU Horizon MSCA PF 2021 programme.
The AtHOME project asks a central question: How can we understand animals as being at home with human-built infrastructure? In historical research, infrastructure has largely been treated as uncritically human – a space where nonhuman animals are deemed out of place, or perhaps even pests. This project is funded by the Research Council of Norway's FRIPRO-programme.
Research networks
NoRS-EH is a national school for research into the environmental humanities. The school is a cooperative venture between NTNU Trondheim, the Univerisity of Agder, the University of Bergen, the University of Oslo, and the University of Stavanger. It is funded by The Research Council of Norway's Scheme for National Researcher Schools.
Asia-Norway Environmental Storytelling Network (ANEST) explores how knowledge and values related to the environment are disseminated and negotiated through stories in a wide variety of genres. This interdisciplinary cooperation between Norwegian and Asian researchers makes it possible to compare and contrast environmental stories in different cultural contexts. The project is financed by The Research Council of Norway's INTPART-programme.
BRIGHT: Bringing Research in Green Humanities into Teaching
The BRIGHT network was established in 2018 as a NordPlus Higher Education Network. Its goal is to envcourage and support cooperation on integrating the environmental humanities into existing first and second level teaching in the Nordic and Baltic countries. The network is financed by Nordplus and The Greenhouse.
The Greenhouse publications with UiS Scholarly Publishing Services
The Greenhouse has a growing series of publications that are available online via UiS Scholarly Publishing Services.
