Anja Moum Rieser

I am a Research Engineer at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) at the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment, since May 2021. I coordinate various events and educational activities at the EHL,  in addition to working with communications and website editing.

Projects

Occupy Climate Change! (OCC!)

I work on the project OCC!, now with funding from the KTH Climate Action Centre, focusing on the practices and experiments of grassroots organizations' diverse, dynamic, self-organized responses to loss and damage from climate change. Here I specifically coordinate the Atlas of the Other Worlds,  an open-access living archive that gathers cases of various urban grassroots and municipal initiatives that are tackling climate change. The idea is to show that climate change is not only addressed on a global or individual level but to make visible the collective climate action that is already happening. We are always looking for new entries, so if you are interested to contribute to the Atlas, please contact me.

Within the OCC! project I also coordinate the Occupy Climate Change school, a school for early-career researchers, on climate change and its consequences of loss and damage, focusing on interdisciplinary research and direct action concerning environmental justice, climate justice, environmental history, and storytelling.

Crosscuts

I have been the festival coordinator of EHL’s Crosscuts Environmental Humanities Festival for Film & Text in 2022, a  festival that brings together film, speech, and writing of the environmental humanities to create humanistic conversations on pressing concerns between the worlds of research, art, and activism.  We are currently planning the festival in 2023, get in contact if you want to know more.

Background

I have a broad interdisciplinary background with a focus on sustainable development, with a Master's in Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development from Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Here I wrote my thesis on urban foraging in Stockholm, exploring people’s relationship to gathering common resources, i.e. fungi and wild and planted vegetation, and berries. This thesis was part of the Green Access project,  a larger research project that focuses on understanding people's ability to use and gain access to public green areas. I have also researched people’s relationship to blue commons, i.e fishing in Stockholm, within the Blue Urban Commons project at Uppsala University. My main research interests are urban nature, access to nature, environmental justice, climate justice,  human-nature connection, and biocultural diversity.