Our inter-faculty research group brings together humanities and social science scholars who study environmental harm - starting out from, but not limited to, human-made toxicants - to better understand alterations to human and non-human life and related threats to health and prosperity. Together we examine and reflect on our own and other disciplines’ ways of knowing and writing about these concerns, of acting against them, and of doing anthropology in our time.
Our group meets 3-4 times every semester, usually on Thursdays 2-4 p.m. For each session, we read and discuss 1-3 papers on a specific topic, which we choose jointly as our conversation progresses. The group welcomes students on all levels interested in environmental and medical anthropology, chemical harm and toxic substances, and in related knowledge-making, policy and activism around the world.
The recent anthropological focus on human-made chemicals in environments and bodies, and the toxic threats they pose, reflects wider societal concerns with environmental destruction and loss, and irreversible changes to life on our planet; it also recombines fundamental anthropological concerns: from ethics and political economy to landscape and nature, from food and consumption to science and technology, from kinship and gender to history and temporality - to name a few. It thus offers ample opportunities to bring anthropological thinking to bear upon urgent real-world problems that concern us all.
Our research group links SAI, HELSAM and TIK, and the social science, medical and humanities faculties at UiO, and draws on colleagues working in, e.g., the Anthropogenic Soils project, the Epidemic Traces project (both RCN) and the AntheEM programme (NORAD).These collaborators combine social anthropology with a wide range of perspectives, such as environmental history and postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS), inter-species ethnography and the political ecology of resource extraction and industrial agriculture, as well as conservation and environmental activism.
