ECODISTURB (completed)
The project studied the Nordic response to the climate crisis and loss of nature. Did climate actions, #fridaysforfuture, and flight shame show that the Nordic countries have a special role to play in the global fight for climate and nature?
About the project
The project "The Ambivalence of Nordic Nature: Gift. Guilt. Grace" studied how the Nordic Societies encounter the challenges raised by the global climate crisis and the ongoing destruction and denial of nature.
Researchers from philosophy, theology, psychology, biology, anthropology, and literary studies aimed to establish an interdisciplinary understanding of the complexity of the Nordic relationship with nature. The relationship is characterized by contradictions such as guilt and grace, shame and gift, destruction and recreation.
The goal was to explain the past and explore how we, as a society, can act politically, culturally, and scientifically moving forward –?in a world at a tipping point.
Sub-projects
- Nordic Narratives of Gift and Guilt.
Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Ole Jacob Madsen and Marius Timmann Mjaaland. - Nordic Nature in the Anthropocene: Shame, Guilt and New Responses.
Dag O. Hessen, Ole Jacob Madsen, Arne Johan Vetlesen. - Ecopsychology and Ecophilosophy.
Ole Jacob Madsen, Arne Johan Vetlesen and Marius Timmann Mjaaland. - Crisis and Creativity: Cosmology and Anthropology Reconsidered.
Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Elisabeth Oxfeldt and Dag Olav Hessen.
Cooperation
- Department of Psychology?(PSI), UiO
- Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, (ILN) UiO
- Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas?(IFIKK), UiO
- The Faculty of Theology, UiO
- The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences,?UiO
- Department of Biosciences, UiO
Financing
NOK 13?million, almost 2/3?from UiO:Norden and the rest from the?Faculty of Theology, the?Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, the?Department of Psychology?and the?Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies.?
Duration
2020-2023
Members
-
-
-
-
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
University of Oslo
-
-
Simone Kotva
University of Oslo
-
-
-
-
-
-
Christina Nadeau
University of Oslo
-
-
-
-
-
Events
Decolonize Nordic Nature
Time and place:?Apr. 19, 2023?–?Apr. 21, 2023,?Neskirkja, Reykjavik, Iceland
About this Workshop?
We must all decolonize our minds in Western culture?to be able to think differently about nature,?about the destruction humans cause.
- bell hooks,?Belonging: A Culture of Place?
In the decolonization processes taking place in the Nordic region, the future of planetary life is crucial and critical. Contemporary accounts of the region place place at the heart of their accounts, relating it to urgent geopolitical, such as eco-system degradation, mass extinction, activism and Indigenous rights. The epistemologies preserved by the Greenlandic Inuit and Sámi communities, once actively suppressed and rendered almost voiceless, are now shown to maintain a wealth of environmental practices and ways of living vital to sustainable development. Nevertheless, having long been "unthinkable" in mainstream scholarship, the role of colonialism in Nordic cultures, much less in the devastation of Nordic nature, is slow to gain acceptance. If anything, Nordic nature since the Romantic period has been a source of utopian narratives underwriting the myth of an exceptionalist Nordic identity. In this context, nature becomes "the other" and is easily decoupled from culture; it is then either romanticized and stereotyped or simply denied. The situation is one that calls for decolonial indigenization, a reorientation of knowledge production based on balancing power relations and transforming the academy completely.
The short-term aim of this workshop is the preparation of a volume of research articles, essays and photographic essays based on the workshop presentations. The workshop asks how "nature" may be rethought-both historically and in the present day-from the perspective of Nordic subalternity. Walter Mignolo thought of "subalternity" as alternative logics, ways of life and modes of being subsisting within coloniality and modernity, yet indicating ways of thinking and acting beyond coloniality and modernity. The workshop seeks to voice subaltern perspectives in the Nordic region, in order to better think with its decolonizing processes in a time of planetary emergency. We bring together experimental, risk-taking methodologies and immersive approaches focusing on practice and collective thinking outside conventional disciplinary boundaries. The workshop is organized as a performance-conference, with academic papers juxtaposed with two presentations by artists and writers.?
The workshop is co-organised by Sigrí?ur Gu?marsdóttir (University of Iceland) and Dr Simone Kotva (University of Oslo) for?ECODISTURB, with funding from?UiO:NORDIC?and?ReNEW (Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World).
Program?
Live presentations by:
- ?ile Aikio?(Research Fellow in Social Sciences, University of Lapland)
- Ragnhei?ur Bogadóttir?(Associate Professor in Social Sciences, University of the Faroe Islands)
- Sara Ekholm Eriksson?(Independent Artist, Stockholm
- Marion Grau?(Professor of Systematic Theology, Ecumenism, and Missiology, MF vitenskapelig h?yskole, Oslo)
- Sigrí?ur Gu?marsdóttir?(Associate Professor in Practical Theology, University of Iceland)
- Lana Hansen?(Independent author, Copenhagen/Nuuk)
- Simone Kotva?(Research Fellow in Theology and Earth Ethics, University of Oslo)
- Sanna Valkonen?(Professor of Sámi Research, University of Lapland)
Remote Participants
- Petra Carlsson Redell?(Professor of Systematic Theology, University College Stockholm)
- Lovisa Mienna Sj?berg (Associate Professor, Sámi University of Applied Sciences)
- Zdenka Sokolí?ková (Visiting Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, University of Oslo)
- Alexandra Meyer (Doctoral Researcher, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria)
- Helga West (Doctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki)
Seeing Nature: Contemplative Ecology Symposium
Time and place:?May 11, 2022 5:00 PM?–?May 14, 2022 4:15 PM,?Trondheim,?Pilgrim Center
In contemplative traditions, seeing is not a neutral activity but a spiritual practice involving the body and the senses in the perception of a more-than-human world. In recent decades, contemplative practices have for this reason become increasingly important to ecological thinking. This symposium addresses the contemplative turn in recent ecological thought, focusing on ecocritical recoveries of Christian ascetic practices and mysticism, the relationship between contemplation and creativity, and the convergence between contemplative ecology and phenomenology.
This symposium will provide a space for the meeting of theory and practice, and for the sharing of experience. There will be opportunities for attendants to participate in morning contemplative practice lead by Douglas Christie and Fr. Francis Tiso, and evening satsangs with Fr. Joshua Lollar and Bishop Erik Varden. Weather permitting, there will also be a?guided walk along the old pilgrim's route to Trondheim cathedral, and an excursion to Monk's Island (Munkholmen), an island in the Trondheim fjord and the site of a medieval Benedictine monastery.
Program
Wednesday 11 May
- Pilgrim walk and lecture:?Marius Timmann Mjaaland?(University of Oslo)
Thursday 12 May
- Simone Kotva?(University of Oslo): Introduction to the symposium
- Douglas Christie?(Loyola Marymount University): Love's Deepest Abyss: Contemplative Practice and the Common Life in a Time of Loss
- Francis Tiso?(Independent scholar): Abelard against Bernard Revisited: Reason versus Faith, or Semantics versus?Contemplatio?
- Jacob Sherman?(California Institute of Integral Studies):?An Unrolled by Glorious Fragment: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Contemplative Reading of the Book of Nature
- Contemplative ecology laboratory
- Elizabeth Powell?(Durham University): David Jones and the Art of Perceiving the World
- Evening?satsang?& conversation: Facilitated by?Bishop?Erik Varden
Friday 13 May
- Morning contemplative practice (Chapel of the Cathedral)
- Joshua Lollar?(University of Kansas): Seeing Nature and the Nature of Seeing in Maximus the Confessor
- Elizabeth Theokritoff?(Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies): 'Cosmic liturgy': Worship from all creation in the Eastern Christian tradition
- Erik Varden?(Roman?Catholic?Territorial Prelature of?Trondheim): "If thine eye be single" (Mt 6:22 KJV): On Seeing Chastely
- Cassandra Falke?(Arctic University of Troms?):?Wise Passiveness: Responding to the Call of Nature with Wordsworth and Marion
- Evening?satsang?and conversation: Facilitated by?Fr. Joshua Lollar
Saturday 14 May
- Morning contemplative practice (Chapel of the Cathedral)
- Christina Gschwandtner?(Fordham University):?The Microcosm in the Macrocosm: Worldview, Human Agency, and the Environmental Crisis
- Andreas Nordlander?(Gothenburg University): What Manifests Itself in Nature? Phenomenologies of Enchantment
- Gunnar Gjermundsen?(University of Oslo):?Aisthesis noera: Patristic and Pre-Socratic Teachings on the Enlightenment of the Senses
- Plenary concluding discussion
Published May 26, 2020 5:15 PM
- Last modified Mar. 13, 2026 1:56 PM
link-language
link-language-offscreen
