The researcher group Geographies of community, politics and place gathers researchers with an interest in how places and landscapes are produced and shaped in interaction with social, political, material and emotional processes. In the group we place particular emphasis on developing new perspectives on the position, role and idea of local communities as places for interaction.  

The growing inequalities between people along social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions, and an increasing spatial segregation based on these, call for new ways of understanding ‘the local’ as an arena for inclusion, co-production and participation as well as contestation. Building on longstanding research at the Department on place, landscape, belonging, mobility and citizenship, the researcher group applies social and cultural geographic perspectives to better understand how material realities are created, practiced and reproduced through experience. The research in the group is empirically broad and spans the global north and south, the urban and rural and the individual and social. 
 

Ongoing research projects

• Building recilient blue places? The importance of equity and blue space in assembling a blue economy: Frode Flemsæter (led by Ruralis)
• Community, landscape and spatial justice: Gunhild Setten, Frode Flemsæter, Don Mitchell
• Undoing the landscape: land-use management and local responses towards invasive plants: Tonje Sommarset, Gunhild Setten, Frode Flemsæter
• Locating the ‘nature crisis’ in Norwegian land use decision making processes: Jessica Larsson, Gunhild Setten
• Holding Aid Accountable – Plural Humanitarianism in Protracted crises (AIDACCOUNT): Hilde Refstie
• Co-producing smart sustainable cities - the role of knowledge production in fast policymaking: Hilde Refstie, Hilde N. Rørtveit
• Exploring culturally diverse perspectives on Norwegian environments: Gunhild Setten
• Changing Places: Effects of ecovillage establishment on rural places in Norway: Alana Lennon, Nina G. Berg 
• Samhørighet som ide, hverdagsvirkelighet og samfunnsprosjekt: Hilde N. Rørtveit, Annika Olström, Nina G. Berg
• Towards a new vocabulary for displacement: Articulating the everyday co-production of places in Uganda (InPlace): Hilde Refstie, Hilde N. Rørtveit 

Strategic research group funding

• Geographies of community: unpacking the politics of the local: Gunhild Setten 
• The geography of social cohesion and polarization in Norway: Hilde N. Rørtveit, Thomas Halvorsen