Environment, Climate and Disaster
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Nature and environmental phenomena have different meanings for people engaging with them. There is a broad spectrum of understandings and interactions, ranging from indigenous ontologies and religious engagements with nature, to nature-governing at the interface of the state and the market.
Themes explored at the department include how people live and cope with risk and disaster, like volcano eruptions in Japan, water scarcity in Peru, wildfires in Sweden, and tsunamis in different contexts. Others focus on epistemologies and practices related to the environment constructed as a resource or as intrinsic value to be preserved in subarctic Asia, problematizations of Eurocentric conceptions of nature among Russian indigenous people, and displacement of indigenous people in Bolivia, due to climate change.
Topics include nature as livelihood and life world for human and non-human engagements, notions of landscape and living environment, environmental justice and activism, as well as the environment as subject and setting for conflict and negotiation between anthropocentric epistemologies, exploited valuations, and indigenous ontologies.