Environmental humanities – Research Group – Department of Art and Media Studies
Environmental Humanities
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Photo: Environmental Humanities Human activity has significantly altered the geology of our planet. Climate change and human engagement with it will determine the future of life on Earth. The urgency of this predicament, although widely perceived and lamented, has yet to yield the kind of global consensus-based actions that existing science tells us will be necessary to reverse, slow, or even successfully adapt to the changes to our world already underway. The concept of the Anthropocene increasingly figures in humanities research, as more scholars join this vast transdisciplinary project to give this topic its due. Momentum is building among the myriad research fields comprising the environmental humanities, where scholars and students have exciting new opportunities to lend our expertise to the work already occupying many of our colleagues in the social and natural sciences.
We in the humanities know that narratives are not merely instruments of direct, objective communication. We are proficient in the language of stories: we bring our knowledge of aesthetics, representation, and emotional engagement to this endeavour. The stories we tell about our world are important and deserve all the tools at our disposal as we work to shape a sustainable future. Environmental Humanities at NTNU seeks to establish a network for environmental humanities scholars across the disciplines and departments of our institution, and to enable and support the development of research beyond NTNU. Part of our task in the environmental humanities is to emphasize that the environment is not only a backdrop for human activities, and thus we are also interested in widening the notion of storytelling to make space for the perspectives of non-humans sharing the planet with us. The group also aims to build bridges from academia to the public arena, and to contribute to telling more varied stories about human relationships with the environment and other species.
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Photo: Environmental Humanities Human activity has significantly altered the geology of our planet. Climate change and human engagement with it will determine the future of life on Earth. The urgency of this predicament, although widely perceived and lamented, has yet to yield the kind of global consensus-based actions that existing science tells us will be necessary to reverse, slow, or even successfully adapt to the changes to our world already underway. The concept of the Anthropocene increasingly figures in humanities research, as more scholars join this vast transdisciplinary project to give this topic its due. Momentum is building among the myriad research fields comprising the environmental humanities, where scholars and students have exciting new opportunities to lend our expertise to the work already occupying many of our colleagues in the social and natural sciences.
We in the humanities know that narratives are not merely instruments of direct, objective communication. We are proficient in the language of stories: we bring our knowledge of aesthetics, representation, and emotional engagement to this endeavour. The stories we tell about our world are important and deserve all the tools at our disposal as we work to shape a sustainable future. Environmental Humanities at NTNU seeks to establish a network for environmental humanities scholars across the disciplines and departments of our institution, and to enable and support the development of research beyond NTNU. Part of our task in the environmental humanities is to emphasize that the environment is not only a backdrop for human activities, and thus we are also interested in widening the notion of storytelling to make space for the perspectives of non-humans sharing the planet with us. The group also aims to build bridges from academia to the public arena, and to contribute to telling more varied stories about human relationships with the environment and other species.
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Photo: Environmental Humanities Human activity has significantly altered the geology of our planet. Climate change and human engagement with it will determine the future of life on Earth. The urgency of this predicament, although widely perceived and lamented, has yet to yield the kind of global consensus-based actions that existing science tells us will be necessary to reverse, slow, or even successfully adapt to the changes to our world already underway. The concept of the Anthropocene increasingly figures in humanities research, as more scholars join this vast transdisciplinary project to give this topic its due. Momentum is building among the myriad research fields comprising the environmental humanities, where scholars and students have exciting new opportunities to lend our expertise to the work already occupying many of our colleagues in the social and natural sciences.
We in the humanities know that narratives are not merely instruments of direct, objective communication. We are proficient in the language of stories: we bring our knowledge of aesthetics, representation, and emotional engagement to this endeavour. The stories we tell about our world are important and deserve all the tools at our disposal as we work to shape a sustainable future. Environmental Humanities at NTNU seeks to establish a network for environmental humanities scholars across the disciplines and departments of our institution, and to enable and support the development of research beyond NTNU. Part of our task in the environmental humanities is to emphasize that the environment is not only a backdrop for human activities, and thus we are also interested in widening the notion of storytelling to make space for the perspectives of non-humans sharing the planet with us. The group also aims to build bridges from academia to the public arena, and to contribute to telling more varied stories about human relationships with the environment and other species.
Coordinator
Current events
This semester’s course in the Norwegian Researcher School for Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) will be held in Trondheim, hosted by the NTNU Environmental Humanities, TransLit: Sustainable Ethics, Affects and Pedagogies and Narrating Sustainability research groups. The course begins with the premise that environmental crises are also storytelling crises. While environmental crises often demand that we turn to the sciences and technology, this course is explicitly devoted to the role that poetry, theater, fiction, sound, and transmedia arts play in environmental storytelling. Moreover, while narrative practices are often instrumentalized as tools of communication that promote understanding of complex environmental processes, in this course, we will explore more diverse affordances of storytelling. We will explore how stories, sound, and performance transform ecological knowledge, theory, and imagination; how communal practices of story-sharing may model new research methods across the sciences and the humanities. Therefore, the school will focus on environmental storytelling across media—in literature, film, poetry, theater, sound, and transmedia projects—with explicit emphasis on aesthetics and ethics of collaboration and co-creation, community building, and engaged pedagogies.
During the five-day intensive course, we will discuss and analyze several topics in environmental humanities—for instance, environmental injustice, resource extraction, petrocultures, colonialism, permacrisis—through diverse theoretical and methodological prisms. We have enlisted diverse local and international environmental humanities practitioners (scholars, artivists, educators) to facilitate workshops, lectures, field trips, sound walks, deep listening, and hands-on training sessions. Participants will also be invited to engage in practical, hands-on work to learn how to work ethically with aesthetics, ecologies, storytelling, and communities grounded in situated local and global contexts. This multilayered course format aims to promote public engagement, nonextractive practices of collaboration, and offer a space to develop and practice new narrative and analytical and transdisciplinary skills, with a nuanced understanding of several areas of EH inquiry.
Application Guidelines: PhD students from any country and any discipline are welcome to apply. The NoRS-EH school is free of charge to all. ANEST network and NoRS-EH members should identify their affiliation in the application. Your application must consist of 1) a maximum 1-page explanation of your motivation for participating in the course, including a short description of your research interests or project, and 2) a 1-page CV. Please submit your application as a single PDF file and send it to both email addresses, hanna.musiol@ntnu.no and libe.g.zarranz@ntnu.no by February 29, 2024.
Admission guidelines are as follows:
1) NoRS-EH and ANEST members: The course is offered as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) and The Asia-Norway Environmental Storytelling Network (ANEST), and priority will be given to NoRS-EH and ANEST members. Persons who are based in Norway but are not NoRS-EH/ANEST members will be treated the same as applicants outside of Norway (#2 below).
2) Non-NoRS-EH/ANEST members, including applicants based outside Norway: PhD students based in any country and any discipline who are not members of NoRS-EH are also encouraged to apply for this course. Any places not filled by NoRS-EH members will be offered to students from outside the school. There is no course fee, but students outside NoRS-EH must cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. Advanced MA students or practitioners (MA-holding environmental storytellers, filmmakers, artists, activists) may be considered in exceptional cases, based on the availability of spaces.
NoRs-EH membership: Students based at a Norwegian university in any discipline working on any PhD project related to environmental humanities are encouraged to join the NoRS-EH doctoral researcher school.
For more information about No-RS-EH, visit The Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) | University of Stavanger (uis.no). For more information about EH8000, visit Course - Topics in Environmental Humanities - EH8000 - NTNU
Previous events
The prospect of transitions to low-carbon futures raises the possibility of critical engagement about the interests of industry, art, and science for enabling sustainability and under scenarios that aim to accommodate ideals of “economic growth”.
Two specialists on transitions from Rice University, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, engage with specialists from NTNU Transitions, institutes and research groups for an evening of open conversation to consider the critical practices of transition combined with its contradictions and potentialities.
In this event we explore: what are the possibilities and opportunities for meaningful critique amidst transitions? On the one hand, universities are increasingly engaging in industry heavy collaborations in a quest to instigate rapid societal change, often through “innovation missions” which rhetorically offer win-win solutions for Europe. On the other hand, the same institutions re-frame problem solving through engaging with the arts, co-creation exercises and other techniques, that do not necessarily seek to solve existing problems, but to re-formulate ideals of what good future societies might look like. This event will feature both the instrumental and the experimental and ask if fruitful common ground can be found. Questions to explore include: How does the Norwegian petrostate manage vulnerabilities in transition? What are practices and interests of contested histories (land tenure, power politics, opposition movements, state sovereignty)?
Structure:
Introduction - Arthur Mason (10 Minutes)
Speakers (10 minutes each)
Tomas Skjølsvold, KULT NTNU
Cymene Howe, Anthropology, Rice U
Ferne Edwards, Design NTNU
Dominic Boyer, Anthropology, Rice U
Break
Discussants (5 minutes each)
Alexander Dodge, Geography
Hanna Musiol, Humanities
Asgeir Tomasgard, NTNU Energy (invited)
Hilde Bjørkhaug, Sociology (invited)
Ruth Woods, KULT (invited)
Hans Martin Thomassen, Social Anthropology
Public participation
Date: Monday 2 May at 18.30 – 20.30
Location:
DIGS Creators Community coworking space,
Krambugata 2, 7011 Trondheim, meeting room 502 on fifth floor
Wine with light refreshments
Co-hosted by NTNU Sustainability, NTNU Energy Team Society, FME NTRANS, Departments of Social Anthropology and Geography, NTNU Environmental Humanities.
The Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) invites applicants to attend a week-long PhD course in “Environmental Storytelling and Narrative”.
Where: Trondheim
When: April 25th - April 29th 2022
This course explores the centrality of storytelling and diverse narrative practices in the environmental humanities as tools of communication that promote understanding of complex environmental processes and capture ecological imagination, and as catalysts for emotion and pathways to civic engagement.
Students will examine how several fields within EH theorize and engage with narration, both broadly across the international field as well as more locally in the Nordic region, including collaborations with cultural institutions in Trondheim.
The course is coordinated by the Environmental Humanities Research Group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim.
Instructors: Ingvil Førland Hellstrand (University of Stavanger), Cajetan Iheka (Yale University), Julia Leyda (NTNU), Hanna Musiol (NTNU), Hugo Reinert (University of Oslo), Nicole Seymour (California State University, Fullerton), and others to be confirmed.
Can you get involved in environmental and climate change by watching disaster movies? Can immersing yourself in a color-by-numbers activity give you a better understanding of the consequences of temperature changes in the ocean? Can you be more aware of temperature fluctuations by knitting a hat?
We set up a stand called “Miljø og Kultur” at the Forskningstorget on Friday and Saturday September 20 and 21. At our booth, we showed how environmental and climate awareness can be created through popular culture, creative pastimes, and hobby activities. We were happy to see that our stand not only was well-visited, but we also won the third prize for best stand at Forskningstorget 2019! Thank you to all of you who visited us and contributed to our success.
FNs Naturpanel lanserte 6. mai sin første globale rapport om verdens naturtilstand. En million av verdens åtte millioner arter er truet. Mange av dem risikerer å bli utryddet de nærmeste tiårene. Hver femte norske plante, dyr og sopp står på rødlista over utrydningstruede arter. Utbygging av industri, veier, kraft, hyttefelt og bolighus, flatehogst av skog, intensivert monokultur i landbruket og gjengroing av artsrikt kulturlandskap er den største trusselen.
Vi er mange som er bekymret for tap av biologisk mangfold og klimaendringer. Det er jo tross alt grunnlaget for livet på jorda. Men hva kan menneskene gjøre for å bevare naturmangfoldet?
Under vår fagdag kombinerte vi naturfaglige og kunstneriske presentasjoner. Målet var å skape dialog mellom forskere, kunstnere, politiker og publikum.
Fagdagen hadde tre deler. Den første delen fokuserte på insektene, da de utgjør to tredjedeler av alt liv på jorden. Flere land advarer om massiv insektdød. Vi vet ikke hvordan det står til med insektene i Norge, men forskere skal endelig finne det ut. Når summingen fra insektene stilner forsvinner også kvitringen fra fuglene. Mange andre arter, som for eksempel mennesker, er avhengige av insektene.
Den andre delen satte fokus på relasjoner mellom livet i havet og menneske. Vi fikk kunnskap om hva som skjer med sjøfuglene og sårbart arktisk dyreliv. I den tredje delen av programmet feiret vi den internasjonale Villaksens år 2019 med fortellerteaterforestillingen Being Salmon, Being Human.
Marco Armiero, Director of the Environmental Humanities Lab at KTH, Stockholm.
"Welcome to the Wasteocene: Sabotaging the Anthropocene through Guerrilla Narrative”.
Where: Kunsthall Trondheim, the Rivers of Emotion, Bodies of Ore exhibit.
"Welcome to the Wasteocene” opens the fall ARTEC Seminar Series devoted to the humanities, technology, ecology, and the arts. The event is free and open to the public!
About Marco Amiero: Armiero, the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the founder of ToxicBios, an archive of personal stories of contamination and resistance at the KTH / Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is one of the most recognized environmental historians and environmental humanities scholars. His research focuses on toxic waste, migrations and environment, and climate change, the city, science, and power in ecological conflicts, and he works on environmental justice at global, local, and transnational scales.
Armiero is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books, including A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy, and a (co)editor of groundbreaking Environmental History of Modern Migrations, Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, and A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories. He serves as a senior editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism and an associate editor of Environmental Humanities. At KTH, he leads the Occupy Climate Change! project researching grassroots innovations in New York, Istanbul, Rio, Stockholm, and Naples.
We are happy to announce that we were represented at the NTNU Ocean Week 2019.
On day 1, May 6th, Julia Leyda and Hanna Musiol made presentations in the "Other voices - Other Stories" sessions.
- Time:.14.25 - Julia Leyda; Oil, Ocean and the Climate Unconscious in Norwegian scripted television.
- Time: 16.05 - Hanna Musiol; “Plotting Futures: Hydro Magic, Sacrificial Landscapes, and Ecological Imagination.”
28 September 2018
10:00 – 16:00
NTNU Kalvskinnet: Suhmhuset Auditorium
This one-day public symposium brings together scholars from film and media studies, literary studies, performance studies, and visual culture to share their current research on contemporary humanities responses to the Anthropocene. Specifically, the participants will discuss their work analyzing the discourses and aesthetics surrounding narratives about climate change, extreme weather, extractivism, extinctions, and the Arctic.
Speakers:
Nassim Balestrini, University of Graz
Anne Gjelsvik, IKM, NTNU
Julia Leyda, IKM, NTNU
Hanna Musiol, ISL, NTNU
Diane Negra, University College Dublin
Julia Peck, University of Gloucestershire
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter: @EnvHumNTNU
Organized by NTNU Environmental Humanities Research Group, with support from NTNU Department of Art and Media Studies, NTNU Sustainability, and NTNU Oceans.
Current teaching
Summary of the course description below:
Our contemporary moment is marked by an increasing awareness of serious and rapid changes in living conditions on Earth. This course will address the social, cultural, and political issues associated with our contemporary moment, which researchers suggest could be a new geological era: the Anthropocene. If we accept that human activity affects the rhythms of geological phenomena, we in the humanities must also ask how we can make sense of our place in the world today. What is nature? What is human? How should we think about the human in the world? Do humans have obligations to nature and the planet? Questions like these form the backdrop of this course that addresses humanities perspectives on topics related to climate, environment, and nature. This provides further basis for discussing how the term 'Anthropocene' contributes to new questions, new issues, and new ways of exploring things in the humanities. This is done through thematic organized project work.
Previous teaching
Environmental storytelling and narrative
This course will explore the centrality of storytelling and diverse narrative practices in the environmental humanities, not only as tools of communication that promote understanding of complex environmental processes and capture ecological imagination, but also as catalysts to emotion and pathways to civic engagement. Students will examine how several central areas of inquiry within EH research theorize and engage with narration, both broadly across the international field as well as more locally in the Nordic region (including collaborations with the cultural institutions in Trondheim).
The course will investigate the articulation across narrative media forms of environmental humanities research topics that may include resource extraction, petrocultures, blue humanities, haunting, solastalgia, mourning, irony, and affect. In addition to theoretical and thematic engagement with environmental storytelling, this course will have a practical hands-on component and a special focus on public dissemination and cooperation with community partners. The students will learn how to collaboratively develop an outward-facing public engagement output.
The course is held as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH), whose members will receive funding for travel and accommodation. Norway-based students are encouraged to first enroll as members of the School in order to receive funding. See here for more information and application details: https://www.uis.no/forskning-og-ph-d/ph-d-utdanning/forskerskolen-nors-eh/. PhD students in Norway or other countries may also apply, provided they can fund their own for travel and accommodation.
FM3002 is a theoretical film and media studies course. The course instruction is research-based, which means that topics addressed in the course will vary according to the research interests of the teaching staff.
Students will gain valuable insight into theoretical approaches and research methods, as well as the communication of current research results, which will be useful as they embark on their own research for a master's thesis.
Instructor: Hanna Musiol, Ph.D. / E-mail: hanna.musiol@ntnu.no
Stories . . . are all we have, you see, / all we have to fight off / illness and death.—Leslie Marmon Silko
We need the language of science and poetry to save us from ignorant irresponsibility.—Ursula Le Guin.
Western literary and art traditions have given us a rich, powerful, seductive cultural vocabulary of “place,” “wilderness,” “nature,” and (nonhuman) animals, but they have also facilitated a gendered and raced way of seeing humans’ relationship to other species, environmental resources, and to each other, often through the anthropocentric and colonial lenses. South African artist William Kentridge recalled not being able to “see” the South African land around him because the British landscape-painting tradition made the actual polluted South African landscape “unreal,” invisible.
And yet, in our own times of ongoing environmental crises, scientists and poets alike are insisting on the key role of the arts, storytelling, and not just science alone, “for the Earthly survival” (Donna Haraway; Ann Lowenhaupt Tsing). This fall, therefore, we will pay special attention to the speculative and civic power of literature and transmedia storytelling to “imagine what exists” and what can be (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten). We will explore the way in which storytellers engage diverse audiences in debates about ecology, and we will participate in several such public debates ourselves. Our job will be to work to develop an understanding of several environmental issues (climate change, fossil extraction, species extinction, toxicity, food/water security, human exceptionalism, and the varied timeframes of environmental violence) through the interdisciplinary prisms of not only literature, film, mixmedia arts, but also environmental (and) indigenous studies, law, anthropology, and biology. While we will begin our investigation in the North American environmental and literary contexts, our intellectual journey will continue across times, disciplines, and geopolitical spaces in recognition of literary studies and the environmental humanities’ planetary and interdisciplinary scope. At the same time, we will leave ample space to consider the environmental concerns of our local space and time, in Trondheim, and in Norway during the Sami Centennial (TRÅANTE 2017).
At the end of the semester, and in addition to the goals listed on the web (strengthening your narrative, writing, and presentation skills for interdisciplinary, critical and creative inquiry), you are expected to be familiar with several examples of environmental storytelling in diverse genres and media; to develop a theoretical and critical vocabulary relevant to the environmental humanities; to recognize the importance of collaborative public humanities work; to reflect on the role of literature in shaping views about the environment; and, last but not least, to recognize the role of critical reflection in your own writing, reading, and research. To facilitate such interdisciplinary learning, our workshop-based course will be taught in partnership with the Kunsthall Trondheim, the Academic Guest Network / NTNU for Refugees, the Trondheim Kommune, the Falstad Center, and several local and international guest artists and scholars (Sissel Bergh, Krista Caballero, Marco Armiero, Henry Mainsah, and Carl Martin Faurby). Therefore, we will depend on interdisciplinarity and collaboration to build our course, and your active participation in all classes, screenings, Kunsthall seminars, workshops, and online debates is indispensable to the success of English 2501.
Keywords: Nature, Environment, Storytelling, Extraction, Extinction, Waste, Toxicity, Violence, Time, Science, Technology, Indigenous Knowledge, Justice
PhD Research Seminar: Theories and Methods in Environmental Humanities
Time and place: Oct. 30, 2019 9:00 AM–Nov. 1, 2019 7:00 PM, University of Oslo/Tøyen Hovedgård/SALT
This three-day intensive course serves as an introduction to theories and research methods in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. In the Anthropocene, it becomes increasingly clear that environmental issues cannot be understood from the perspective of a single discipline. This research-oriented course is aimed at graduates from the humanities and social sciences who work on environmental topics and wish to expand their repertoire of theories, research skills, and creative methods. You will get hands-on experience from lecturers with different disciplinary backgrounds: from literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, history, media studies, and others. The course will lay special emphasis on creative and unconventional research methods and modes of representations, such as the use of film, photography, sound recordings, art installations, or exhibitions. We will pay particular attention to the mechanisms by which individual disciplines come together into the larger whole of environmental humanities. The course is organized by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH).