Notes from the North

Sofia Jonsson , 2021-04-19

The Division is currently working hard to put together the history of 2019 and 2020 in a new biennial report. While waiting for the final print, we have picked up this nice piece from our former report, written by Rexsac doctoral student, Jean-Sébastien Boutet. Enjoy!

Notes from the north, 2019

Text by: Jean-Sébastien Boutet, 2019

This past summer I had the chance to travel to Canada to participate in different field schools and explore new research possibilities in the general area of Indigenous economic history. Anthropologists and ethnographers might refer to this period as their “pre-fieldwork,” or “fieldwork: season 0,” but whichever the name, it is invariably made of a strange mix of uncomfortable encounters, beginner mistakes, and a very unhealthy dose of self-doubt.

I started off in a sense where I began, in Schefferville, along the Québec-Labrador borderlands, the site of my previous graduate fieldwork where I wrote about the mining history of the region. It was special, almost surreal, to come back to this place after so many years to witness all the changes, but perhaps most extraordinarily the continuities that characterize the close-knit and isolated communities who depend, for better or for worse, on the industrial production of iron ore. Due to a lack of imagination, or better terms, I entered people’s homes introducing myself as the researcher from a decade ago who came to write about you, and has not returned since. Amazingly, I was offered coffee and a willingness to tell more stories in exchange; some even remembered me, and with guilt I could only produce, like last time, a vague promise to return again, “soon…”

I thought, in Schefferville, about the passage of time. The mining industry, much like researchers, cyclically staging a return as a function of financial swings, following the devastation of a previous abandonment. Elders whom I once interviewed have now passed, or are travelling to a far away hospital, unsure about when they will be able return to their family and home community. I’m told there are only about 30 elders left here, people who were born in the forest, sur le territoire. Surely their precious life history must never be forgotten, but how?

Mining the Québec-Labrador border. (Photo by author)

From Québec I carried on to the west coast for a short stop on the upper canyons of the Fraser River. There was also a going back to the roots of sort, in this case to the beginning of the Canadian mining industry (at least to my mind…). Indeed, on the Fraser, accompanied by incredibly knowledgeable Indigenous guides, rafting superstars and field scholars, we negotiated a relatively tame portion of the river – the one between Lillooet and Lytton – and visited river bars where, starting in the mid-19th century, Chinese migrants expertly operated placer gold mines in the most rigorous conditions imaginable. All this, interestingly, almost half a century ahead of the nation defining moment that constitutes, in the Canadian imagination, the Klondike gold rush. Despite the impressive work of scholars that have made these abandoned sites come alive again, there is still much mystery surrounding the composition of social life and labour conditions at the mines, whether these early miners could turn a decent profit, and most interestingly for me, the nature and extent of Indigenous peoples’ involvement with Chinese labourers.

Descending the Fraser River. (Photo by author)

The third major component of the travels took me to Winnipeg, and from there by road all the way past Thompson to northern Manitoba. This portion of the trip assembled an eclectic group of professors, students and artists dedicated to learning first hand about the impacts of hydroelectric development on First Nations communities in the province. Despite the enthusiasm of the group and endless humour from our Indigenous guides, this place had a more sombre tone. Compared to former and operating mine sites, which are certainly destructive but equally so full of life or traces of past lives, there is a deadening aspect to river damming ines; houses and school buses abandoned on submerged lands; a drowned moose, sick fish, and the abstract fear of possible methylmercury contamination; to sum it al local economies.

Evidently, I do not know what of make of it all. It was, at minimum, a productive year zero in the field for me. I was glad to be reminded about the field, how much I love the field, how much I miss it, how difficult and real it is. I remembered where I am most comfortable, at the kitchen table, on the lake, listening to the words and not saying very much, just awkwardly explaining myself and the purpose of our presence here.

Tataskweyak (Split Lake), July 13, 2019.
—Did I tell you the story of when I went to look for porcupine with my dad in 1975?
—No.
—Ok. I will tell you the story of when I went to look for
porcupine with my dad in 1975.
—Ok

It is for these simple encounters, these generous telling
of a story imbued with morality that feels bigger than
the land, that I love the north most. It’s where I hope to
return, “soon…”

The Afterlives of a Windowfarm

Sofia Jonsson , 2021-03-22

Anna Svensson was a doctoral student with the Division and the Environmental Humanities Laboratory, and successfully defended her thesis A Utopian Quest for Universal Knowledge – Diachronic Histories of Botanical Collections between the Sisteenth Century and the Present in 2017, when she left us for new flowers to pick. Anna was our unofficial florist, and could often be seen decorating even the darkest day with brilliant flowers and plants. One of her contributions during her time with us, other than being a wonderful colleague, was the window farm. Today’s blogpost is a text about the story of the Window Farm, written by Anna for the Stories of the Anthropocene Festival (26–29 October 2016).

This is the story of a window farm – the beginning, the end, and the afterlife.

This story begins with the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment (home of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory) moving to a newly built, climate controlled premises. It had a spacious kitchen and big windows. As these windows could not be opened, however, the air felt stale and dry. Building a windowfarm was a practical measure to improve our common working environment, improving the air quality and making ourselves feel more at home.

Over the past two years, these plants have breathed with us, and the humming of the pump and the dripping along the chains have filled the pauses in our conversations over lunch. The first attempt was a mediocre success: a few plants (basil and lemon balm) died almost immediately; the ivy and coffee plants fared much better, but eventually succumbed to systemic problems. The nutrient solution evaporated too quickly – we added plastic pipes along the chains to minimise splashing, but this did not fix the problem – eventually causing the system to clog up completely.

Learning from past mistakes, the next reincarnation of the windowfarm in the fall 2015 only contained plants that have robust root systems and survive for a long time in water without the addition of nutrient solution. The result was astonishing. The spider plants grew explosively, sending out shoot after shoot like a verdant fire-work show. (The pump died and was replaced.) Gradually, however, this enthusiastic growth became a cause for concern. The many shoots were thirsty, and eager roots began to seek their way through the water holes at the bottom of the bottles and creep along the chain. Several Monday mornings I was greeted by the silence of a system run dry. The roots and chains were so interlaced that replanting was not an option. We could either dismantle it or watch it wither.

Since taking it down, it has left an emptiness in the kitchen. I still register the silence that meant the tanks were empty or the system had clogged. In a concrete way, the windowfarm has played out like a pageant of the technofix, a microcosmic drama between the biosphere and technosphere that hovers between comedy and tragedy. Is this a story of survival? The windowfarm is itself a DIY innovation (and later corporate venture) encouraging a growing global community of windowfarmers to green the city beginning with each individual home, a promise towards self-sufficiency. What initially seemed so straightforward gave way to complication after complication, in which the very successful growth of the second planting required its destruction: there are limits to growth in the technosphere.

What, then, is the afterlife of the windowfarm? The shoots have been rooting in glass jars along the kitchen windowsill, with the main plants in pots of water. The torn bottles and rusty chains cannot be used again. While the windowfarm made the office kitchen more home-like for me, the university is not my home and with the migratory life of an academic I could not ensure its survival through the empty summer months. It became a burden.

Corona environments and some reflections on the entanglements of the coronavirus pandemic

, 2020-04-30

by Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius, PhD Candidate, University of Oslo

The Covid-19 pandemic testifies to the importance of understanding human relationships to the environment as entangled. This pathogen is the most recent, but certainly not the first, aggressive reminder of how overwhelmingly physical the intertwinement between environments and human bodies is. SARS-Cov-2 is a zoonosis, a disease transferred to people by animals from another species. It may have transferred from pangolin to human on a Chinese ‘wet market’ (Image 1). In these open-air markets, wild game is sold and slaughtered on sight for its meat or, in the case of the pangolin, its scales. In some brands of Asian traditional medicine, the consumption of body parts of certain wild animals allows humans to ingest their characteristics like strength, agility, or fertility. Building on these traditions, it is the exquisite nature of such meat that raised its high demand among the ultra-rich. The devastating effects of this virus invite a discussion about the complex and intimate connections among humans as consumers, between humans and those animals they consume, and finally, about how together they cohabit in space and time.

Image 1: A ground pangolin, native to central Africa and one of the eight subspecies that can be found in tropic climates in Africa and Asia where they feed on ants and termites. Pangolins are critically endangered due to loss of habitat and heavy poaching because of their scales and meat. Source: Wikimedia commons.

The new coronavirus is not the first zoonosis with vast deadly effects. However, it is the first that, since the Spanish flu, has made its way to the cultural and capitalist centers of the western world, with catastrophic effects for their economies. Ebola (transferred by human consumption of bats) has caused tens of thousands of deaths, and HIV (presumably transferred from a chimpanzee) has made no less than 34 million victims. These viruses were raging in West-Africa, Eastern Europe, and LGBTQ-communities in the western world, by and large marginalized spheres around the globe.

A disease with an unimaginable deadliness like Ebola seems to belong to “Other” spaces, including its occurrence in other times. Violent imperial histories of explorers fighting malaria have narrated Africa as primitive and impenetrable because of the relentless tropic fevers. The HIV-virus made its way to the United States, where it victimized and stigmatized the outlandish members of society. Their vulnerability was unforgivingly explained by what was considered abhorrent, immoral, uncivilized behavior. Today, the exoticization of the new coronavirus can be seen with the insistence of the US Government to address China as the virus’ origin. Quite like skyrocketing everyday racism against Asian Europeans, this blame builds upon much older colonial discourses that dictate what is “Other” and therefore dangerous. As can be seen, those discourses that connect the tropics to dangerous disease and disposability of human life are violently persistent today. French doctors suggested that Africa could be a testing ground for the vaccine against the new coronavirus, a “hangover from colonial mentality that needs to stop” according to the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Feeding into this idea of the virus as something of another place, species, or environment, is the nature of the interactions with animal bodies through which the virus could spread. Sonia Shah shows in her book Pandemic, Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2016) how a combination of enhanced and prolonged interspecies contact and a lack of biodiversity allows pathogens to circulate between human and nonhuman bodies. In Europe, cattle are not slaughtered in the open air, and there are no farms where civets or dogs are caught or bred for consumption. Nonetheless, animals are bred into being for humans to eat their body parts on an unprecedented and industrial scale.

For instance, the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe, both in terms of people and cattle, and it has a substantial and politically present agricultural sector. The latest zoonosis was Q-fever, causing extreme fatigue and heart failure. Between 2007 and 2010, this virus infected about a hundred thousand people, left a thousand chronically ill, and killed about a hundred people on and around goat farms. Q-fever was hard to trace down, because it could not move through interhuman contact; and in some people the symptoms only manifested themselves after months or even years. The RIVM, the national health authority, responded to the Q-fever crisis by intensifying communications and knowledge sharing between veterinarian and human medical scientists. Although their recommendations for the preservation of public health have been systematically dismissed by the Ministry for Agriculture under pressure of the agricultural sector, this effort goes to show how microbes also blur scientific boundaries between environments.

Ironically, many of the Dutch goat farmers had chosen to switch the production from pigs to goats after the swine flu outbreak had caused them to cull and destroy no less than 11 million animals a few years earlier. When animals are held in stables with hundreds or even thousands of genetically similar individuals at the same time, pathogens can easily move from one body to another. For that reason, and because it causes a slight increase in physical growth of the animals’ body mass, the use of antibiotics is widespread among pig farmers across the world. The closer humans and animals are moved into the same habitat, the lower and less sophisticated the microbial barriers for both viruses and bacteria become. The aggressive and drug-resistant MRSA bacteria, that has been ravaging the effectiveness of antibiotics within the health sector in the last decades, shows that microbes that can repeatedly move from pigs to humans and back can pose serious, deadly threats to human and nonhuman bodies (Image 2).

Image 2: An electro-microscopic image of a human white blood cell (blue) ingesting an antibiotic resistant MRSA-bacteria (purple). Source: Wikimedia Commons

This goes to show why environmental boundaries between human urban space and the nonhuman, wild space become increasingly unhelpful in understanding how also the current Covid-19 pandemic came about, how to suppress it, and how it could have been prevented. Like historian of technology Kate Brown argues, “self-isolation is key if we want to stop the pandemic – and yet the need for isolation is, in itself, an acknowledgement of our deep integration with our surroundings.” Not only in terms of scientific knowledge practices but also in biological terms, different environments, nature, and culture are all intimately entangled.

Animals have a particular role to play in defining those spaces as separate environments of home, wilderness, and production. Confined to their domestic spheres, people have collectively been seeking out the company of pets. In Chicago, they have been adopting so many dogs and cats that that the local shelter has been empty for the first time in its existence. In these same homes, Netflix aired the mega-success Tiger King, a documentary about the unadulterated insanity of private tiger farms that keep more tigers in captivity in the US than exist in the wild worldwide. After seven episodes of absurdist entertainment, a viewer might arguably conclude that the charismatic animals with which it all started are the ones that are left stranded by the very people that claimed to protect them, and deserve better than to live a life in small, filthy cages to the amusement of naïve spectators.

Whether it is tigers, dogs, pigs, goats, or pangolins, the deadly devastation and socio-economic disruption of pandemics like the one caused by the new coronavirus testify to the fact that in biological terms, their bodies as microbial ecosystems are part of the same multi-species environment. Yet, the cognitive dissonance that has been cultivated for the last decades with regards to what animals deserve compassion and which are consumption products is part and parcel to what dictates a discursive separation of what animals are house pets, poached or captive wild animals, domesticated factory goods, or a combination. At best, upholding this separation runs the risk of being analytically limited for environmental humanities scholars, and, at worst and when perpetuated by national governments with economic interests, it has proven to be lethal.

Report: Dying at the Margins Workshop

, 2019-12-02

by Jesse D. Peterson and Natashe Demos-Lekker

On September 26-27, the Environmental Humanities Laboratory—along with the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology—hosted the Dying at the Margins Workshop. Put together by PhD students Jesse D. Peterson (KTH) and Natashe Lemos Dekker (University of Amsterdam), this workshop brought together scholars at various stages of their career and from various backgrounds and disciplines to discuss how contemporary perspectives in environmental humanities and the medical humanities might further research on how dying “bodies”—animal (including human), plant, thing, place—challenge natural, normative, and notions of a “good” death. The workshop had two keynote presentations, along with discussions of participant papers and a creative embroidery workshop.

On the first day, Dr. Philip R. Olson (Virginia Tech) presented his work on bodily disposition. Beginning with Roy Scranton’s premise in Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, he posed the question as to how might the demise of culture impact body care? If the Anthropocene is largely a problem of scale, what challenges and opportunities will face the disposition of human bodies now and into the future? Looking specifically into the practice of “natural organic reduction” (essentially composting human bodies) alongside other disposition technologies—such as alkaline hydrolosis, burial pods, green burial, submersible reef balls, and promession—Olson articulated how these alternative forms of disposition claim to be more environmentally friendly than burial or cremation as well as gentle forms of body recycling. Yet, as he pointed out, individualist norms “die hard,” that is, although a stunning array of new technologies have challenged the social and cultural norms of disposing of a corpse, many end users don’t want to see their loved ones transformed by some kinds of ecological relationships or contaminated by the technologies that process multiple bodies. For instance, what critters and creatures are allowed access to corpses or how do people negotiate the possibility for bodies to be passive rather than active forms of nourishment? As a conclusion, Olson suggested that these issues lead us to consider what kind of species ought we to be, asking us what are the moral virtues to be cultivated and moral vices to shun. He argued that humans not only need a species centered history but a species focused virtue ethics.

The second day, Dr. Marietta Radomska (University of Helsinki and Linköping University) spoke to us about the need for “queering” death studies. Responding to calls in queer theory and posthumanism that challenge normative conceptions of the human subject, a queer death studies ought to help reconfigure notions of death and practices related to it that have relied upon such conceptions. In other words, by challenging basic assumptions about dying and death, queering death can lead to producing alternative imaginaries about dying, death, and the dead beyond gender and sexuality. It also provides the means for moving away from “normative ontologies”

Marietta Radomska presents Queer Death Studies

Participants were also treated to an embroidery workshop led by Karina Jarrett (Broderiakademi), who stitched together ways in which fine arts feature in memorial, memory, and creative response to loss and grief. Having been working with residents of Malmberget, a town in northern Sweden currently being dismantled and “moved” to allow for the expansion of the local mine (LKAB malmberget), Jarrett curated a personal exhibition and provided the participants with time to express themselves by embroidering a friendship card. The experience highlighted how there is still very much to be done when facing loss even when there feels like there is nothing left that one can do.

Workshop participants practice their stitching.

Thanks to all the participants for their attendance, energy, and enthusiasm.

From Sicily to Sweden: Lessons in History and Environmental Humanities

, 2019-09-12

by Elisa Privitera (Lizzy), C. M. Lerici Foundation Fellow

My story with Sweden started around two years ago. It was a scorching and sunny summer. I had just gotten my Masters Degree that explored the creation of a community laboratory that sought to regenerate a historical and neglected district in Catania—my hometown in Sicily—when my supervisor said to me, “What do you think about Sweden?”

“Sweden, hmmm…” I hesitated, trying to take time in order to dig into my memory and knowledge, to collect ideas for a right answer.

Waiting patiently, my supervisor prompted me again, “So?”

I sighed, “Actually, not too much. Why do you ask?”

Two years later, at the end of January 2019, I landed in the evening at Stockholm’s Skavsta Airport in order to accomplish about 6 months of research as a visiting scholar at the Environmental Humanities Lab at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment here at KTH. Oh yeah, I was in Sweden!

But why did I come here? Tracing back the story, during the two years in between my masters degree and my arrival, I continued to work and do fieldwork concerning environmental and urban planning. I collaborated with some grassroots associations, which furthered my interests in the processes of reactivation of derelict spaces. And I started a PhD program where I’ve continued to explore the link between environmental issues and urban planning as a member of LabPEAT– an action-research lab of ecological and environmental design. Working on my PhD, “Evaluation and mitigation of urban and land risks”—begun in 2018 at the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture at the University of Catania—I began to investigate the issues of community empowerment with environmental risks and the planning and regeneration of derelict areas.

Locations of LabPEAT in Catania and EHL in Stockholm

My thesis explores risky landscapes, such as all those post-industrial or in transition landscapes that have been deeply modified and contaminated due to the heavy human footprint. If the landscape can be conceived as the place of people and people’ point of view (Pizziolo and Micarelli, 2003), how can the local knowledge collected by the people’ stories influence the planning field? Or more generally, what can be the role of subaltern communities in the production of knowledge about risk in order to co-design neglected and contaminated areas? Starting from these research questions, my aim is to experiment an alternative approach to risk landscapes by investigating the issue of environmental risk from a qualitative and environmental justice point of view and by putting particular emphasis on storytelling. Since I believe that the industrial and contaminated areas represent a melting-pot of the inequalities as well as a prime example for debate on how to plan current and future risk landscapes, I have chosen to focus on Gela, a fishing village in the South of Sicily that has been converted into one of the main Italian petrochemical poles. In Gela, I had already started to collect stories about daily life from some inhabitants. But I understood that I still needed to deepen the theme of the potential role of the narrative.

That is why I came to the Environmental Humanities Lab (EHL) on a C. M. Lerici Foundation fellowship. Understanding the roles of narratives in order to tell the right story (Barca S., 2014) or to portray a more complex story of landscapes (Gravagno F., 2008) is an expertise of the EHL. It combines research, training, and outreach to tackle crucial societal challenges, such as climate justice, migrations, environmental justice, and rights to the city. The EHL has driven several projects on environmental justice over the years, such as Toxic Bios.

This public environmental humanities project has assisted my research through its aims to co-produce, gather, and make visible stories of contamination and resistance, by using the methodology of storytelling, as also explained in a published article. The collection of oral stories can be a useful tool for many purposes:

for uncovering toxic narratives centered on structural environmental injustice;
for co-producing knowledge;
for increasing the empowerment and collective capabilities of local communities (community building);
and for triggering an action-research path in contaminated territories in order to co-design a different future.

So, by having in mind the purpose of deepening the potential role of the toxic biographies in the planning of contaminated areas, I landed in the darkness at the airport of Skavsta, covered by layers of white snow during that January night. The day after my arrival I moved to live into one of the student dormitories on KTH Campus—a newly erected building with an amazing view on the cityscape of Stockholm. The following months have been an intense flurry of learning, experiences, and challenges!

Upon my arrival, I began a literature review about environmental justice, political ecology, and environmental history, as suggested by my KTH supervisor: Prof. Marco Armiero. Stockholm was so cold, with iced lakes and fascinating snowscapes sprinkled with nightlights in front of windows to face the darkness. February passed in a jiffy, and in March I started to attend a course for the Ph.D. candidates in “Theory and Method in Historical Research” and a course for master students in “Environmental History.” Both the courses have been challenging. In the first course, “Theory and Method in Historical Research,” I had the possibility to study and debate on many current issues, from Bruno Latour’s books to the epistemological research of feminist theory, from materiality to STS studies. The array of themes has been quite varied and helped me to frame and address my own research questions from time to time in a new way, by enriching certain points of view about it. Meanwhile, thanks to the “Environmental History” course, I investigated the historical connections between migration flows and environmental pull and push factors. These experiences gave me some insights on how to frame my topic as well.

Until then, I have collaborated with the EHL on two running projects. Also, I have collaborated and participated in the lab meetings that take place more or less once a week. On the 21st of March, I also had the opportunity to present the activities and research carried out by LabPEAT of Catania during one of these lab meetings. Over the months, I got fully involved in Division life, for instance, by attending the Higher Seminars in which other scholars come from everywhere about present on current research topics.

Lizzy at the Lab. From left to right: Roberta Biasillo, Lizzy Privitera, and Marco Armiero

Also, frankly speaking, I have fallen in love with fika, an on-purpose-organized break with the aim of socialising among colleagues. The fika is sweetened by tea, coffee and a lot of sweets, typical from Sweden. Some of the main sweets are the “Princess cake,” the “kanelbullar” or “kardemummabulle”, and so on. In particular, the cinnamon bun can be considered the queen of Swedish cuisine! Thereby, in my opinion, among the key-words regarding Sweden, I would suggest FIKA! Between fika, readings, assignments and interesting discussions with colleagues, April arrived. It brought lighter hours, warmer weather, Easter and Walpurgis night, or Valborg. If the days of Easter have been characterised by the blooming of the trees at Kungsträdgården that attracted locals and tourists during several days, Valborg is one of these things about which I did not know about but that is a quite important event for Swedish society. In fact, it is a custom coming from northern Europe, and it consists of lighting bonfires in public spaces in order to celebrate the arrival of spring collectively. All throughout Sweden, there are bonfires with family and groups of friends who enjoy the flames. I got to enjoy Valborg from the seaside of Stockholm!

In the middle of May, the two courses ended. I started to draft a summary of the concepts learned about toxic autobiographies and environmental justice. In the meanwhile, nicer days came. When the sun arrives, it is a bursting event, a kind of explosion of joy and chilling out, and all Swedish (and not only!) people begin to scatter among the public places of the city: picnic on the parks, walks on the city, beers in terraces and gardens, events in the squares. A festive spirit rises. I started to stroll around the city in order to explore it. I visited Skansen park which gives lots of information about the history of Sweden and typical Nordic animals, some museums, such as the Nobel Prize Museum, and the park behind the KTH campus which is full of deer and forest animals.

At the beginning of June, I went back to Italy for a conference where I presented work I developed based on what I learned in the “Theory and Method in Historical Research” course. The title of the work is “Contaminated Entanglements,” and it will be soon part of a publication. “Contaminated Entanglements” concerns the complex set of connections between environmental components. Things, matters, bodies, humans and not, all are part of this entanglement. Especially, according to Stacy Alaimo (2010) in the contamination of the human and non- (more than) human bodies can be read the transcorporeality of the toxicity.

Another first output of this period of research at the EHL has been the paper titled “The Toxic Biographies and the “Small Data” from an Italian petrochemical town (Gela, Sicily)” that I have presented at the City Futures IV Conference in Dublin. This paper is a first and embryonic fruit of the collaborative work between the two research laboratories, LabPEAT and the EHL. This collaboration has brought us to experiment and propose an ecological and relational community design that uses toxic biographies as tools for converting the personal stories of life into collective knowledge. In fact, through the collection of stories a shift occurs from an individual tragedy to a self-aware community which can embark upon the quest for justice. By doing so, toxic auto-biographies become also a way to re-politicize the embodied experience of injustice. Once a community—formed as the result of a struggle—becomes aware of the diffused injustices, an ecological community design path can be triggered.

As July arrived, the end of my experience drew near, and I returned home. A second intense year of Ph.D. is now in front of me. The future goals for this year will be to continue to carry out a full-immersion and fieldwork in Gela (Sicily). More and more auto-biographies will be collected, and I will try to trigger an action-research path by engaging inhabitants and grassroots movements in order to map the risk landscapes as they are perceived by citizens and also in order to co-design alternative futures for this contaminated area. For sure I will have to deal with doubts, readings, editing and so on, but I am also optimistic about the decisive turning points. I do believe that future meetings with some of the scholars I have met at this division during these past few months will be fruitful and inspiring for my ongoing research!

That’s why I am really looking forward to coming back to Sweden one day again, and at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in particular!

Tack and see you soon!

What if…? Redefining research impact from an environmental humanities perspective.

Sofia Jonsson , 2018-09-20

The following text has been conceived as an environmental humanities critique to research policy regarding what are considered “research initiatives of excellence”.

Authors: Irma Allen, Jesse Peterson, Daniele Valisena, Anne Gough,
ENHANCE ITN – PhD Students, KTH – Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment

What if…? Redefining research impact from an environmental humanities perspective.
What if ….? What if….? What if….?

All researchers want their work to have an impact and are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate it. But what does this mean? At present, research impact is largely defined in relation to dominant neoliberal economic frames. The language of excellence, innovation, development, marketability, knowledge economy, and the building of human capital are cornerstones to how funding agencies measure the value of academic outputs. But is this the best way to define impact? Critique of the research impact agenda by now is widespread, and we think that environmental humanities offers insightful ways to rethink what is meant by impact in radically alternative ways that address specifically environmental concerns.

Environmental Humanities (EH) takes as its starting point the idea that humans and nature are radically inseparable and that humanities subjects (literature, history, philosophy, arts, etc.) have the potential to provide key insights into the ways we live, why we do so, and how we can change. Environmental humanities research provides historical perspectives, situates scientific and technological change in cultural context, addresses ethical problems, interprets and provides new narratives, and works with local communities.

Humanities teaches about the power of words to make worlds. Storytelling as a way to generate alternative narratives is therefore at the heart of environmental humanities practice. This collaborative piece by four people undertaking a PhD in EH is a speculative attempt at what it means to redefine research impact through what we have learnt from doing environmental humanities research. Speculating means here supposing, hypothesising, venturing, or simply, imagining – asking ‘what if….’?. We speculate here from an EH perspective about ‘what if’ research impact was thought differently and how? What kinds of impact do we wish to be making? What do environmental humanities teach us about how we might measure research results, outcomes, and processes differently? Together we propose a story about the kind of research worlds we would like to inhabit.

We take four core concepts that are currently central to how research impact is understood – Mobility, Innovation, Employability, and Economic Growth – and rethink these. Instead, we propose that from an emphasis on mobility we shift to support for inhabited movement, that from a focus on innovation we switch to re-valuing innovative teaching that enhances ecological living, that from a concern with employability we highlight the building of ecological ability, and that from an obsession with economic growth we move towards degrowth as central ways that impact is defined. What if this was at the core of how research impact is measured..?

Employability
From employability to ecological-ability

Proposals for research funding illustrate their impact by describing how they will train researchers so that they be employable. Employability as a concept has become normalized, leading to funding opportunities, research projects, university courses and programs that survive only if they can promise to deliver a path to higher earnings. To meet this criteria, research projects train researchers in skills to capacitate them to work in a variety of academic and non-academic positions.

Employability–as a modified model of the linear career path model–is a reductive vision of a more ecologically-sound life path. By disregarding non-instrumentalist values within humanities scholarship, making researchers employable ignores different forms of training possibilities and opportunities. Satisfying employability as an impact criteria molds the researchers into marketable, tradable, commodities whom are personally responsible for their failures in employment and career. Because markets change, jobs increase or decrease, “employable” researchers can only find success in the terms of the market. In other words, universities bear little responsibility for providing researchers with jobs while they rely more heavily upon non-institutional funds. And, as a virtue of their employability, researchers are often uprooted, traded like sports players, and disincentivized to form lasting, meaningful relationships with local communities. Though a broader imagining of employability could take individual factors, personal circumstances, and external factors into account, employability negates the justification for actively cultivating skills and talents that do not serve the growth of the market economy. Employability serves globalized economic or political values over social or environmental ones.

From an EH perspective, researchers need ecological-ability. Rather than attempting to develop employability as a diverse set of skills that a researcher can pull out of his or her pocket like a swiss army knife or smartphone, funding could foment values and skills that extend outside economic logic to fulfill non-universalized ethical and ecological obligations. Impact could be measured by providing researchers with habits that contribute to the flourishing of lives and worlds, with an eye towards human health and well-being (an EU Environmental Policy objective). Training, therefore, ought to be provide researchers with life skills that enable them to improve the quality of life for themselves and other communities, including animals and environments. Qualities like reflexivity, community engagement, supporting alternative cosmologies, ethical action along with practical skills including gardening, holding an activist rally, foraging and hunting, writing a poem become as meaningful as one’s ability to publish an academic paper, plan a conference, or manage project finances.

Mobility
From mobility culture to inhabited movement

Scholars’ mobility is considered to be one of the key factors in defining the quality of a research project. Internationalization of research, network-building, and human capital exchange all contribute to demonstrating the successfulness of an academic project. For example, in 2012 Swedish funding agency Vinnova launched the “Mobility for Growth” program, whose “overall objective is to support career development for individuals through mobility” (p. 2). Horizon 2020’s funding document underlines that in order to improve Europe’s “attractiveness for researchers […] research projects should encourage them to move between countries, sectors and disciplines to enhance their creativity and innovative potential” (p. 984). EU funded research programs also value the enhancing of mobility among academics as a concrete way of shaping European citizenship. But what kind of European citizenship does this produce? Although it is true that mobility of ideas and researchers has long been a fundamental component in the construction of an international scientific community – both for hard sciences as well as for human sciences – engaging with environmental humanities implies questioning the simplistic equation that mobility = good research and, more specifically, that increased mobility (hypermobility) = positive impact. Moving scholars’ bodies across borders and cultures entails moving and mixing cultures, habits, family and relational ties, ways of dwelling and ways of being together with other people, other environments and different ecologies of life.

Our carbon and ecological footprint should be considered when evaluating the impact of research projects. According to KTH’s Travelling Scientist, “researchers who want to contribute to a more sustainable world are on average emitting two tons of CO2-equivalents per year”. Imagine the increases in carbon usage for researchers required to be mobile. It’s counterintuitive for researchers aiming to reduce a local or global carbon footprint by increasing their own. Being hyper-mobile has its impacts; it boosts international connections — but perhaps at the expense of slower forms of engagement more locally, and also often to the detriment or risk to the researcher’s own wellbeing, sense of place, and capacity to build an ecological life. The very action of continuously moving between one country and another — be it to take part in training activities, perform multi-sited fieldwork, build a network, or participate in international conferences — contradicts basic knowledge about environmental harm.Thus, hyper-mobility cannot be part of any environmentalist agenda.

Environmental humanities research studies and supports experiences, livelihoods and research practices that promote a transnational and translocal sense of place without losing sight of the social and ecological relationships in various communities.

We need to be able to have the possibility to inhabit places as much move in and between spaces as scholars engaged in genuine transformative, environmental humanities work. Inhabiting takes time.

Environmental humanities as a research practice can and should contribute to preventing globalization from displacing de-rooted professionals across the globe, as well as criticizing the neo-liberal project (the flexibilization and causalization of academic laborers on the job market) behind the creation of intellectual placeless reservoirs.

Against economic value-producing and placeless citizenship fostered by hyper-mobility, environmental humanities promote community-based research practices, built around slow mobility, place, as well as human and more-than-human relations. As Ursula Heise framed it, environmental humanities helps retracing the sense of place (2008), while the hyper-mobility that informs many research agendas ends up loosening place-based ties. Trans-locality as an open form of dwelling should be a constituent of both research subjects as well as researchers’ lives. All those characteristics shape a form of ecological citizenship and awareness that should be the core mission of any environmental humanities projects.

Innovation
From Innovation towards valuing innovative teaching inclusive of more-than-human worlds

The need to prove impact through innovation is a standard part of many research grant applications. But ‘innovation’ in this context most often means new products, services or technologies. Innovation can also be measured through publication output. But one area that has the biggest potential to create innovative impact within academic work is grossly undervalued or marginalized – that is, teaching. One reason for its low status in academia may be that teaching is a gendered practice – often treated as ‘women’s work’ because of its deployment of emotional labour and care. We propose that the concept of research innovation expands to include teaching, and innovations in teaching, as a central measure of impact on the kinds of students, or citizens, universities and research influences. ‘Students’ in this case should mean both those within the traditional boundaries of the university, but also, and more critically, those beyond.

Environmental humanities seeks to develop more equitable relationships among human and non-human communities. Rather than technology being the one-bullet answer to societal challenges, pedagogy allows for researchers to actively participate in shaping societal values, relations and responses to change, including building human-non-human engagement and the embedding of persons within an ecological world. Teaching is often the space where students can critique and imagine approaches to ways of living, justice, and environmental crisis, and learn to de-centre the human individual. Teaching changes the innovative product model to one where innovation is internalized in active subjects as students.

In particular, EH rests on the requirement that we participate in the world as we find it through learning and practice. It becomes about being ‘an effort to inhabit the difficult space of simultaneous critique and action’ (Rose, et al. 2012). Thus teaching should be understood ‘as action and the classroom as ‘the field’’ (Tripp, Muzzin, 2005; Hutchins 2012). Innovative teaching points towards the development of practice- and field-based learning particularly within the environmental humanities where experiential learning must be a central component if we are to apply our knowledge towards change.

Growth
From growth to degrowth

Research impact is often defined in relation to its contribution to economic growth measured in GDP. Yet the agenda of environmental humanities is at the very least critical of, if not outright oppositional to, economic growth as an overarching societal goal, since unfettered growth lies at the heart of the environmental crisis, including biodiversity loss, climate change, and resource depletion. So should the value of our research be measured in relation to it? Since, as economist Tim Jackson states, ‘Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries’, such a query is often deemed ridiculous. Particularly for researchers who must comply with the economistic boundaries of grant awarding bodies and funding agencies. Yet taking environmental humanities seriously points to the need to articulate this very question. The concept of ‘degrowth’ is emerging as one of the key modes by which environmental humanities is expressing this call for alternative practices (see Emmett and Nye 2017 and Nelson and Schneider 2018). This should apply to ways that research impact is defined too.

The ‘degrowth’ movement calls for relinquishing ambitions for growth, pursuing instead the aims of a steady-state economy. This is motivated both by the material reality of a drastic slowing-down of global economic growth as a contemporary sustained trend, combined with ecological and social limitations, including the fact that economic growth has increasingly failed to deliver on its promises of improving collective wellbeing, apparent in rising mental health issues, growing social inequality, and mounting ecological disaster. The Research and Degrowth community in Barcelona defines sustainable degrowth as a ‘downscaling of production and consumption that increases human wellbeing and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet’. What if research impact was measured in relation to contributing to such a downscaling of growth, producing happier, healthier, more productive and connected people and communities in the process? How would this redefine our research questions, practices and outputs? One of the main outcomes would be a refocus on a more expansive conception of wellbeing as intrinsic to the values of a degrowth economy, and therefore a central measure of our research impact.

The notion of human (and more-than-human) wellbeing is a cornerstone principle of degrowth economics. This is perhaps unsurprising since the degrowth movement has grown in traction alongside ideas of alternative measurements to economic growth, such as the ‘Gross National Happiness Index’, adopted also by the UN’s World Happiness Report. In June 2016, the OECD committed itself ‘to redefine the growth narrative to put people’s well-being at the centre of governments’ efforts’. At least rhetorically, wellbeing seems to be all the rage. This is also the case within the Higher Education sector. In August 2018, the UK Minister for Education, Sam Gymiah, said that the role of the University is no longer simply the ‘training of the mind’ but that promoting and ensuring the mental health and wellbeing of its students should be at the heart of its mission. Despite this focus on wellbeing as core to societal progress, research impact frameworks are yet to catch up. How might we think about research impact to focus on the wellbeing that it generates – from the wellbeing of the researcher themselves to the wellbeing of the organizations, communities, and societies that the researcher is part of – as part of a degrowth agenda? What cascade effects might this have on questions of precarity and the flexibilization of academic labour? Environmental humanities, that places questions of value, relationality, cultural ethos, and quality of life at the centre of its agenda, points urgently towards replacing growth with degrowth as an explicit research impact assessment framework to propel new practices to these ends.

Towards environmental humanities impact…

Our exercise in speculative engagement with the notion of research impact leaves us feeling hopeful and also alert to how things stand today. We recognise that currently we have to work within the boundaries of possibility which we inhabit. But as environmental humanities teaches us – imagination, wondering, posing the ‘what if…?’ question is the beginning of narrating new worlds into being. We look forward to a time where inhabited movement, ecological ability, innovative teaching, and degrowth – with their combined attention to wellbeing, care, relationality, and ethics – are core aspects of how we think about and measure the impacts researchers make on the world.

Conferment of two Doctoral Degrees

Sofia Jonsson , 2017-11-21

Friday November 17 the annual ceremony for the conferment of doctoral degrees was held in Stockholm City Hall. The Division was proud to have two former doctoral students on stage; Dr Daniel Svensson and Dr Isabel Pérez. A few of us, who couldn’t make it to the City Hall due to not having defended during the past year, cheerfully and proudly followed the streamed ceremony at KTH.se.

Daniel, who can also put the titles poet and pro exerciser next to Doctor, is currently a researcher and lecturer at the Division of Science, Technology and Society at Chalmers in Gothenburg. However he still works with Sverker Sörlin in our project Movement Heritage, funded by Riksantikvarieämbetet. He defended his thesis in December 2016.

Doctor Isabel was the first doctoral student to defend from the EHL. She has now moved back to Spain and is currently looking for open positions. We can certify that her next employer will not only have a competent and diligent co-worker, but also a great colleague and friend who can set color to even the grayest of November days. Isabel defended in June this year.

We wish them both the best of luck and joy!

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