It can readily be observed simply by looking around or listening attentively in any natural setting, that people’s engagements with their surroundings are different from a decade ago. Today, in the mountains, by the seaside, and in the forests, it is hard to find anyone who is not tapping on their smartphones, flying drones, using wearable cameras, or other gadgets to digitally “capture”, and augment, their experiences of the environment. The objective of DigiFREN is to study this transformative moment of environmental perceptions in Europe. The historically and ethnographically grounded research will elucidate digital aestheticization in/of fragile environments, namely, how is digital media and technology implicated in reframing environmental perceptions, affections, conceptions, and practices. Five places in Slovenia, Croatia, Finland, Norway and Poland, strongly impacted, or seen to be threated, by human activity, have been carefully selected to reflect the cultural and ecological diversity of Europe. Although particularly important in the era of “overheating” (Eriksen 2016), digital aestheticization of fragile environments remains ethnographically relatively understudied. In the humanities, it was debated primarily in art theory, (new) media studies, and philosophy. Furthering these debates, DigiFREN will approach digital aestheticization as it unfolds in everyday life. DigiFREN is the first ethnographic project to undertake a large-scale, comparative study of the topic in a digitalizing Europe. It expands established methodological strategies and introduces the experimental method of senso-digital walking. DigiFREN is uniquely designed to study the shifting and increasingly important relationships between the changing categories of the human, environmental, and technological. Thus, it will produce important results relevant to not only anthropology, history, cultural and sensory studies, but also to human geography, environmental aesthetics and media studies. DigiFREN will produce new understandings of digital aestheticization in/of fragile environments in five European countries. The historically and ethnographically grounded research will elucidate how digital media and technology contributes to reframing and transforming environmental perceptions, sensibilities, and practices. DigiFREN will approach digital aestheticization in/of fragile environments…

The Asia-Norway Environmental Storytelling Network (ANEST) brings together researchers and students from three Norwegian and six university partners in Greater China and Japan to explore environmental storytelling across a wide range of arenas and topics. Drawing upon the expertise within the humanities, this project will draw out the complexities, limitations, and possibilities of environmental storytelling. From a disciplinary perspective, ANEST is situated in the environmental humanities, which brings together history, literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, religious studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and anthropology. ANEST is directed by professor Finn Arne Jørgensen, University of Stavanger, with Hanna Musiol, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as deputy director. The partner universities are Aoyama Gakuin University (AGU), National Chung Hsing University (NCHU), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Renmin University of China (RUC), Shanghai University (SHU), University of Agder (UiA), University of Hong Kong (HKU), and University of Stavanger (UiS). ANEST runs for three years (2020-2023) with support from the Research Council of Norway INTPART program. Visit the project website for updates and more information. Press release: UiS leder norsk-asiatisk nettverk i miljøhumaniora Image: Roof tiles in Shanghai. Photo by Finn Arne Jørgensen.

Envirocitizen is a project that aims to research how to encourage environmental citizenship through engagement with citizen science. The project is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 fund and will last for three years. The work is being coordinated by the University of Stavanger in partnership with: The Estonian Academy of SciencesCyprus Center for Environmental Research and EducationNew Europe CollegeRadboud UniversityUniversity of ExtremaduraSwedish University of Agricultural Sciences Citizen science has the potential to do more than create good science; it can create engaged citizens. Birding activities, in particular bird counting and bird ringing, have some of the longest citizen science traditions in the world. They hold great potential for developing environmental citizenship which encompasses the rights and responsibilities that individuals and collective society have toward nature. We aim to change the context in which existing collection happens in order to build more aware environmental citizens. For more information, visit our project website. While many projects have stressed the scientific quality of citizen science activities, there has been less inquiry into the ‘citizen’ part of the phrase ‘citizen science’. EnviroCitizen proposes that the social capacity potential of citizen science extends to the very roots of what it means to be a citizen of the planet. We want to understand the ways in which citizen science involvement has been and could be in the future used to cultivate environmental citizenship, which encompasses new ways of thinking and acting in all aspects of life to promote environmental sustainability. The EnviroCitizen project brings together seven partners in Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Cyprus to uncover the processes by which citizen scientists working in environmental-based activities can strengthen their environmental citizenship. We have selected to study birding activities because they hold great potential for developing environmental citizenship. We will: assess the evolution of citizen involvement in citizen science birding activities;evaluate how citizens learn about and enact environmental citizenship through their citizen science birding…

We study how people have navigated in nature, and our relationship with nature over time. The human sense of place has come under pressure in the digital age. New technologies, such as GPS, have cut us off from nature. You have probably heard stories about car drivers that uncritically follow GPS directions, act against what should be their better judgment, following the voice of their GPS units into rivers, against one-way streets, along abandoned forest trails, even getting lost in the desert. When the technological world around us gets smarter and more connected, do we get dumber? As locative technologies seem to be changing what it means to be human, we are witnessing a technologically-driven moral panic quite similar to what historians of technology have argued develops around many new technologies. This project will evaluate contemporary claims about the impact of locative technologies on the human sense of place through historical research. To do so, we seek to uncover the historical relationship between the usage of locative technologies such as maps, signs, compasses, trails, guide books, or GPS and the sense of place. The project provides empirical depth to contemporary debates about spatial literacy, the human ability to read and make sense of a landscape, through a deliberately historical perspective. Using case studies from mountain trekking and car driving in the 19th and 20th centuries, the project aims to examine if there are fundamental differences between the ways in which digital and non-digital forms of locative technology influence the human sense of place. The project will develop and refine mediation, annotation, and delegation as analytical tools for understanding the role of locative technologies in the human relationship to the world. Objectives The primary objective of the project is to demonstrate how locative technologies are cultural and phenomenological bundles of relationships that can only be understood through deep empirical and historical studies. This objective will be reached through the following sub-objectives: The theoretical objective is to develop a historically…

Recreational uses of outdoor natural environments have become a fundamental part of Scandinavian national identities since the late 1800s. Through leisure activities like trekking and hunting, people gain access to particular ways of knowing and valuing nature, developed over time as cultural traditions. More than anything else, such activities have come to define what a natural landscape should look like and how it should be valued. This project seeks to understand what happens when new and pervasive digital technologies become part of this relationship with nature. Today, digital devices have become an integral part of many ways of using nature for leisure purposes. For instance, hunters and trekkers alike use GPS units and digital maps for planning, navigating, and sensing landscapes. Cell phones enable instant communication across distance, but also provides extensive information search and documentation opportunities through a variety of specialized apps. Digital photography allows for instant and virtually unlimited capture of scenic views and moments in nature. Such uses of what we can label media technologies can be seen either as augmenting the use of nature (by providing access to otherwise hard-to-acquire information) or as reducing environmental literacy and spatial cognition capabilities by taking away the need to “read” the landscape in traditional ways. This creates a need for extensive cultural negotiations with and about new technologies and their place in nature. The goal of the project is to uncover the ways in which media technologies have shaped recreational uses of nature in Scandinavia since the late 1800s. The project will pay particular attention to digital media technologies post-2000, but will apply a comparative historical perspective to place these technologies in a longer historical context. Such a long time perspective is necessary in order to properly evaluate claims about fundamental changes caused by new media technologies in contemporary Scandinavia. The project will investigate three main research questions: How have historical and current media technologies been incorporated into in…