Coming October 2024. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Book website.

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and connector of lives across time and space. It facilitates ways of looking at, measuring, moving, and killing, as well as controlling, containing, conserving, and cooperating with animals. Sharing Spaces challenges us to analyze how technology shapes human relationships with the nonhuman world, exploring nonhuman animals as kin, companions, food, transgressors, entertainment, and tools.

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 as it unfolds in, and impacts everyday life, and more precisely in the contexts of outdoor leisure in Slovenia’s Alpine region of Solcavsko and Bohinj, along Croatia’s Adriatic coast in Kornati and Paklenica national parks, in Finnish peatlands of Sodankylä and Lieksa, the Norwegian Sørmarka urban forest, and along riverbanks in the Odra river valley in Lower Silesia in Poland. DigiFREN is the first ethnographic project to undertake a large-scale, comparative study of digital aestheticization in a digitally transforming Europe.

Consisting of three partners from the so-called Widening Countries, the consortium consists of the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), who is also the leading partner, Jagiellonian University (Poland), University of Eastern Finland (Finland), Institute of ethnology and folklore research (Croatia), and the University of Stavanger (Norway). The consortium is composed by academic partners accomplished in the fields of environmental anthropology and environmental history, science and technology studies, digital anthropology, history of technology, anthropology of leisure, and sensory studies, as well as anthropology, ethnology and cultural studies of art. As such, it is well suited to address the project’s objectives.

The Norwegian team will use and develop historical rephotography as a method for understanding the digital aestheticization in/of fragile environments. Finn Arne Jørgensen is co-PI on the project, directing the Norwegian team, and is also WP leader.

DigiFREN is funded by CHANSE through the call Transformations – Social and Cultural Dynamics in the Digital Age.

Resources

• Project website: https://etnologija.ff.uni-lj.si/digifren
• NiCHE article: https://niche-canada.org/2024/06/07/past-photos-in-present-landscapes-rephotography-as-a-method-in-environmental-history/

Ant Spider Bee: Chronicling Digital Transformations in Environmental Humanities

Edited by Kimberly Coulter, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, and Finn Arne Jørgensen

spider & cloud

August 2021

ISBN: 978-3-95925-190-7

Inspired by Francis Bacon’s ant, spider, and bee as models of collecting, processing, and transforming knowledge, Kimberly Coulter, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, and Finn Arne Jørgensen founded the blog Ant Spider Bee to reflect on ways technology was transforming the epistemologies, methods, and dissemination of environmental humanities research.

As a kind of time capsule with essays and embedded media by thirty authors, as well as reflections on the project’s own digital practices, this open-access e-book presents snapshots of transformations in knowledge practices during a period of rapid change.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)

Available now in Open Access electronic edition.

This admiration was combined with a certain feeling of affinity between Canada and the Nordic countries, and perhaps in particular my home country Norway. At the risk of stating the obvious or verging on cliches, both are stretched-out countries with low population density and much nature, at the northern edge of a continent. Neither country can be said to be the center of the world, so we have to be concerned with connections. Both have fierce climates that change dramatically over the seasons. Both can be characterized as welfare states. We share an interest in cabins and cottages (which are one of my long-term research interests) as ways of being in nature. In short, both countries seem to be made for environmental history.

And yet, the Nordic countries – until recently particularly Norway – were lagging far behind Canada in terms of environmental history. There were no professorships in the field in Norway; in fact, there were no jobs at all with an environmental history focus. Collaboration between environmental history scholars in the different Nordic countries was also rare. NEHN aimed to change that, with NiCHE as a major inspiration. 

When writing this post, I went back to my original grant proposal, written when I was a postdoc in Trondheim in 2009. Here I stated: 

“The network and the workshop series will address a shared need among Nordic environmental historians. In the Nordic countries environmental history as a discipline has reached varying degrees of institutional support. Since the early 1990s, a series of researchers have initiated environmental history research projects, but few have been successful in developing long-term research groups. As in most European countries, environmental history is rarely formally represented in universities, research institutions or curricula. Research and teaching in the field of environmental history is done by individual scholars at various institutions and under different denotations.” 

In short, there was a considerable lack of institutionalization. To begin working on these issues, we designed the network around four workshops over a three-year period, each dedicated to a particular theme: institutionalization, research, teaching, and project development. We wanted to strengthen our connections similarly to what we were seeing our Canadian colleagues doing. 

Rather than a workshop series set up to produce publications – the “hard currency” of academia – NEHN was explicitly designed to start conversations, to enable collaboration and exchange, to sow the seeds of what could later grow into something more. At the time, I was uncertain about that strategy – both I and my collaborators needed to build our publication track records, but the workshops of NEHN were loose and “soft”. But over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that this strategy was a good one. Bringing people together, forging connections that can develop into something more over time, pays off. Some of those connections took the shape of joint publications, such as the Northscapes book edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, with several Canadian contributions. Others became Nordic research and teaching grant proposals, some of which even succeeded. 

Throughout the funded period of NEHN, we worked hard to forge strong connections to NiCHE. For example, I invited Alan MacEachern and Claire Campbell to the final NEHN workshop in Helsinki in 2011. Claire later invited me to a workshop on “Sustainable Energy in Atlantic Canada” at Dalhousie University in 2013, my first visit to Nova Scotia, and one that I enjoyed tremendously. NiCHE also supported our workshop Bringing STS into Environmental History in Trondheim in 2010, which led to the highly successful book New Natures. Michael Egan and Anya Zilberstein participated through the NiCHE support. Later, we applied for a research grant and a teaching exchange grant with Michael, though they were not funded. 

Environmental history is no longer a niche activity in the Nordic countries. There is no doubt that NiCHE has been important for Canadian environmental history – but NiCHE has also influenced other regions, including the Nordic countries. NiCHE has shown how having a strong community in one region also strengthens others.

Originally published at NiCHE Canada on 10 December 2020.

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.

• The Estonian Academy of Sciences
• Cyprus Center for Environmental Research and Education
• New Europe College
• Radboud University
• University of Extremadura
• Swedish 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:

1. assess the evolution of citizen involvement in citizen science birding activities;
2. evaluate how citizens learn about and enact environmental citizenship through their citizen science birding activities; and
3. develop innovative community interventions designed to complement existing citizen science birding programs in order to cultivate environmental citizenship in the future.

We will create new knowledge and community interventions in six different languages and cultures across Europe through an ambitious multi-language school-based educational program and public engagement events to both increase participation in existing bird counting activities and raise environmental citizenship as a deliberate outcome of involvement in these activities. We have engaged ornithology non-profit organizations as supporting external groups in the project in order to facilitate the research tasks as well as uptake and impact of the project’s intervention deliverables.

University of Stavanger project team:

• Finn Arne Jørgensen, project leader
• Roderick Dale, project administrative coordinator
• Ann Elisabeth Laksfoss Cardozo, researcher
• Endre Harvold Kvangraven, PhD student

Image by Jacek Matysiak.

Silver Linings: Clouds in Art and Science

Edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen

Museumsforlaget

March 2020

360 Pages, 15 x 23 cm

ISBN: 9788283050899

Silver Linings: Clouds in Art and Science er en tverrfaglig antologi som undersøker skyer i skjæringsfeltet kunst og vitenskap. Gjennom tjuesju bidrag får leseren kjennskap til hva skyer egentlig er, både som vanndråper, røyk, støv eller data, og hvordan de har blitt fortolket og portrettert av kunstnere og vitenskapsfolk gjennom de siste to hundre år.

Utgivelsen er et resultat av et tverrfaglig samarbeid mellom Universitetet i Stavanger og Stavanger kunstmuseum for å samle samtidskunstnere og akademikere til et felles forskningsverksted. Redaktørene Dolly Jørgensen og Finn Arne Jørgensen er henholdsvis professor i historie og miljøhistorie ved Universitetet i Stavanger, og har utviklet The Greenhouse som et tverrfaglig programområde ved Fakultet for utdanningsvitenskap og humaniora.

Silver Linings: Clouds in Art and Science is a cross-disciplinary anthology that examines clouds from perspectives that intersect both art and science. Through 27 contributions, readers learn about what clouds can be, not only as water droplets and smoke, but also as dust and data, and how they have been interpreted and portrayed by artists and scientists during the last two centuries.

The book is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Stavanger and Stavanger Art Museum, the aim of which was to bring together contemporary artists and academics to contemplate clouds. The editors Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen are professors of history and environmental history, respectively, at the University of Stavanger.

Reviews

CONTEMPORARY ART STAVANGER 04.08.20

Morgenbladet 17.07.20

Forskerforum nr 6/2020

Stavanger Aftenblad 03.06.20

Kunstavisen 26.03.20

Recycling

Finn Arne Jørgensen

MIT Press

208 Pages, 5 x 7 in.

November 2019

ISBN: 9780262537827

Is there a point to recycling? Is recycling even good for the environment? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Finn Arne Jørgensen answers (drumroll, please): it depends. From a technical point of view, recycling is a series of processes—collecting, sorting, processing, manufacturing. Recycling also has a cultural component; at its core, recycling is about transformation and value, turning material waste into something useful—plastic bags into patio furniture, plastic bottles into T-shirts. Jørgensen offers an accessible and engaging overview of recycling as an activity and as a process at the intersection of the material and the ideological.

Jørgensen follows a series of materials as they move back and forth between producer and consumer, continually transforming in form and value, in a never-ceasing journey toward becoming waste. He considers organic waste and cultural contamination; the history of recyclable writing surfaces from papyrus to newsprint; discarded clothing as it moves from the the Global North to the Global South; the shifting fate of glass bottles; the efficiency of aluminum recycling; the many types of plastic and the difficulties of informed consumer choice; e-waste and technological obsolescence; and industrial waste. Finally, re-asking the question posed by John Tierney in an infamous 1996 New York Times article, “is recycling garbage?” Jørgensen argues that recycling is necessary—as both symbolic action and physical activity that has a tangible effect on the real world.

MIT Press website: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/recycling

Reviews

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:

1. The theoretical objective is to develop a historically robust concept of spatial literacy.
2. The methodological objective is to develop and refine mediation, annotation, and delegation as analytical tools for understanding the role of locative technologies in the human relationship to the world.
3. The empirical objective is to evaluate if there are fundamental differences in how digital and non-digital forms of locative technology influence the sense of place and operate within gendered spheres.

Funding

The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway FRIPRO program, 2019-2023.  Finn Arne Jørgensen, professor of environmental history at University of Stavanger, leads the project.

Team members:

• Karen Lykke Syse, associate professor at Center for Development and Environment at University of Oslo.
• Marie-Theres Fojuth, associate professor at University of Stavanger.
• Erica Colman-Denstad, PhD student at University of Oslo.

Klimaendringer er en av vår tids store utfordringer og klimadebatten tar stor plass i media. Å forstå hvorfor og hvordan klimaet endrer seg krever uhyre kompleks kunnskap fra mange fagområder. Vi er avhengige av modeller, global datainnsamling og store organisasjoner som samordner kunnskapen i en kollektiv prosess. Vitenskapelig enighet oppnås når et stort flertall av forskerne i fagfeltet er samstemte om hva som er relativt sikker kunnskap. Dette skjer gjennom åpen debatt og den kvalitetssikringen som ligger i fagfellevurderte fagartikler.

Gjennom artikkelserien i Magasinet velger Aftenbladet å utfordre dette vitenskapsidealet og selve tanken om forskningsenighet gjennom å løfte fram de alternative røstene som har stilt seg utenfor det etablerte fellesskapet. Disse besitter alternativ fagkunnskap som de mener velter hele grunntanken bak konsensusmodellen. Ingen grunn til bekymring, vi kan fortsette å pumpe opp olje og leve våre liv som om ingenting var i veien. Men er det så enkelt?

Det stemmer at såkalte klimaskeptikere ikke får like stor plass i media som det store fellesskapet av forskere er. Studier viser at opp mot 97% av klimaforskere hører til den siste kategorien. Om media forsøker å balansere representasjonen av de to sidene får vi en fremstilling av klimaproblemet som sier at vi fremdeles ikke har forskning nok til å handle. Dette er en grovt feilaktig fremstilling av dagens situasjon innen klimaforskning.

Globalt finnes det store, frie og grundige forskningsmiljø som har trygg kunnskap om at vi forandrer klimaet. Og så finnes det personer som velger å se bort fra denne overveldende forskningsbaserte kunnskapen, og som heller konstruerer sine egne virkeligheter. Man kan derfor skille mellom de som forfekter det vi vet og de som fornekter det vi vet. De sistnevnte er i betydelig mindretall.

Et viktig mål med vårt utdanningssystem er å skape selvstendig tenkende mennesker med bred og relevant allmenndannelse. Det trenger vi i et demokrati hvor vi må ta stilling til en mer og mer kompleks virkelighet som møter oss som en evig strøm av informasjon fra uendelig mange avsendere med både gode og mindre gode intensjoner. Dette betyr ikke at vi alle skal kunne alt om naturforvaltning, lønnspolitikk eller klimaforskning. Til det har vi forskningsmiljøer med årelang trening i å finne slike svar.

Men allmenndannelsen kan hjelpe oss i å skille et forskningsbasert argument fra en hjemmesnekret teori. Verken demokratiet eller folk flest hjelpes når Aftenbladet forsøker å skape en illusjon av at alle kan ta fornuftig stilling til slike ekstremt tunge faglige problemstillinger som klimaproblemet representerer. Det er like lite fornuftig som å la passasjerene stemme over hvordan piloten skal styre flyet.

Kontroversdrivende avisdebatter er ganske enkelt ikke en fruktbar arena for forskningsdebatt. Det er mer bekymringsfullt at samfunnet ikke hører hva klimaforskerne sier.

Aftenbladets artikkelserie tar oss rett inn i det vanskelige skjæringsfeltet mellom vitenskap og politikk, der kunnskap bør lede til handling. Norges Forskningsråds jevnlige undersøkelse om nordmenns tillit til forskning viste nylig at nesten halvparten av de spurte mente at forskning ofte er kjøpt av industri eller myndigheter og dermed ikke kan stoles på.

Når man mister troen på at vitenskapen kan være uavhengig og objektiv, likestilles forskningsresultater fort med ideologi og personlige meninger. Når forskningen ikke viser det man vil, leter man gjerne i stedet etter alternative forklaringer som bekrefter det man allerede mener.

Her har vi mye å gjøre. Det stemmer at vitenskap aldri er 100% avgjort, og tvilen må alltid finnes der – det ligger i forskningsprosessens natur. Vitenskap kan heller ikke erstatte den politiske prosessen – vi trenger begge like mye. Men dette må ikke hindre oss i å handle ut fra det som til enhver tid er den beste og sikreste kunnskapen.

Om det er så at vi helst ikke vil handle, så er faktisk det store flertallet i det internasjonale klimaforskersamfunnet, de som mener klimaendringene i stor grad er menneskeskapte og at det haster med handling, som er de egentlige klimarebellene. Klimautfordringen handler ikke om å skaffe mer kunnskap, det handler om å skape endringsvilje, om nettopp å ikke fortsette akkurat som før.

Vi trenger modige mennesker som tør å ta til seg det vi vet i dag og som utfordrer business as usual. Og viktigst av alt, vi trenger en klimakunnskap som faktisk får politisk og folkelig gjennomslag. For det forskningen forteller oss er at det haster.

I stedet for å forsøke å skape en illusjon av en forskningsdebatt burde Aftenbladet skape en meningsutveksling om hvordan våre politikere best kan bruke den solide kunnskapen vi har til å møte klimautfordringene.