Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities

Lunch Seminar: Sadie Hale — Storytelling with(out) Whales - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Narrative arcs and constitutive absences in whale tourism.

If you're in Oslo, you can meet Sadie and hear her present her work at a lunch seminar tomorrow!

Don't miss the chance — just drop by: ➡️ Seminar Info: shorturl.at/hQNUA

Sadie's background is incredible! She’s been a whale-watching guide, and her research has covered everything from literary studies to 500-year-old Greenland sharks! 🤯

She brings an amazing interdisciplinary approach to environmental anthropology.

#EnvironmentalHumanities #WhaleResearch

Sensing the Ocean Through Whales: Meet Visiting Researcher Sadie Hale - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Earlier this semester, OCEH welcomed Sadie Hale, a PhD researcher with the SEATIMES project in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Sadie’s work moves across cold seas, coastal communities...

📢 New Blog Post! Meet visiting researcher Sadie Hale, who's exploring human-whale relations and how we sense the ocean in the Norwegian Arctic 🐋

Sadie's work is truly fascinating! Dive into our Q&A now: ➡️ shorturl.at/BHh2t

Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities (OCEH) - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies An open and collaborative platform for interdisciplinary, humanities-led environmental research.

Join us for some cozy December thinking before the year wraps up.

Full event list: shorturl.at/8Vteh

15 Dec — The Air of the Vienna Woods
with Sadie Menicanin 🎶

Forest air, music, and the atmospheres surrounding fin-de-siècle Vienna - plus some hyggelig julegløgg.

8 Dec - From Dust to Dust
with Amita Baviskar 🌫️

Why does extreme air pollution in Delhi fade into the background?
A deep dive into dust, politics, and lived urban experience.

5 Dec - Storytelling with(out) Whales
with Sadie Hale 🐋

A playful + thoughtful look at whale tourism, narrative rhythms, and what it means when the star characters don’t show up.

OCEH December events graphic with winter gnome background.

December is here, and OCEH still has a few bright moments lined up before the year winds down.

If you need some mid-winter inspiration, we’ve got you covered 💫

We hope the blog becomes a space to think together.
Follow along, share, and stay in conversation with us 💚

Where Literature Meets the Living World: In Conversation with Visiting Researcher Stefano Rozzoni - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies We recently had the pleasure of hosting our first visiting researcher of the semester at OCEH. The interview below offers a glimpse into his reflections on research, collaboration, and the role of the...

We’ve also published an interview with our visiting researcher, Stefano Rozzoni, whose work bridges literature, ecology, and creativity.

🎙️ Read the conversation: shorturl.at/CjZn6

Welcome to the OCEH Blog! - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies We’re delighted to share our very first post — and to open this space as a new hub for exchange across our growing network. Here, we’ll continue exploring the ever-evolving world of environmental huma...

Our first post introduces the spirit behind the blog -collaboration, curiosity, and the joy of learning across disciplines.

📝 Welcome to the OCEH Blog: shorturl.at/2cSlA

OCEH Blog - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Read this story on the University of Oslo's website.

🌿 OCEH has a new blog! 🌿

We’re opening a space for sharing ideas, reflections, and stories from our environmental humanities community.
shorturl.at/50jHU

Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities (OCEH) - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies An open and collaborative platform for interdisciplinary, humanities-led environmental research.

🔗 Full details, bios + registration: shorturl.at/vnBSN

Hope to see you there 💫

27 Nov (afternoon) - Talk

New Approaches to Coastal Histories with Wanda Marcussen

Exploring multispecies coastal worlds + new methods for writing them.

📍 P.A. Munchs hus, Room 425
🕑 14:15–15:30

27 Nov (morning) - Symposium

Curating ‘the Wild’

At the National Museum with Isabelle Gapp & Dehlia Hannah. How can art history + ecology help re-imagine museum practice?

📍 National Museum (staff entrance)
🕘 09:00–13:00

Registration required.

18 Nov - Lunch Seminar

Digitally Mediated Planetary Encounters and the Making of a Metabolic Subject with George Cusworth.

How do our daily food choices scale up to planetary change?

📍 OCEH Lab
🕛 12:15–13:00

Bring your lunch, we’ve got coffee ☕

Event poster titled 'November at OCEH' with dates and titles of three upcoming seminars and talks over a background of frosty tree branches

🍂 November at OCEH!

This month, we’re diving into how environments, art, food, and coastlines shape our lives - and how we, in turn, shape them.

Events below 👇
More info: shorturl.at/vnBSN

If you’d like to join our mailing list for future editions - or share this with someone who might - you can sign up here:

💌 shorturl.at/tooRE

Always happy to be thinking with new people!

And yes, there’s a section on underground fungal networks and how trees talk to each other.

Because sometimes the environmental humanities is also just: wonder → curiosity → connection 🌱🕸️

Four visiting researchers joined us this autumn -
bringing whales, forests, archives, images, and stories with them.

The center feels different, in a good way.

Photo of the first page of the OCEH newsletter.

Our second OCEH newsletter just came out 🍂

It’s full of things we’ve been thinking about and doing this autumn - bonfire by the lake, lab talks, PhD fieldwork and new research groups taking shape.

Not a report so much as a snapshot of how #envhum feels in motion.

✨ Read: shorturl.at/PeJVa

Karin Wagner: The plastic in which we live - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Visiting scholar Karin Wagner discusses her ongoing book project Packaging design: sustainability, aesthetics and social issues.

🗓️ Thu, Oct 23
Karin Wagner – The plastic in which we live

On packaging design, sustainability and the social meanings of the materials that surround us.

www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english...

🕐 12:15–14:00
📍 OCEH Lab, 4th floor, P.A. Munchs hus, UiO

#OCEH #Envhum #UiO #Anthropocene

Stuart Earle Strange: What is Anthropomorphism? Human-Macaque Relations and the Problem of Cooperation - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Using examples from human-macaque interactions in Singapore, Stuart Strange explores how anthropomorphism depends on cooperative intuitions that both conceal and reveal wider possibilities for relatin...

Two fascinating OCEH Lab Talks this week 🌿

🗓️ Wed, Oct 22
Stuart Earle Strange – What is Anthropomorphism?

How do human–macaque relations in Singapore reveal both the limits and possibilities of cooperation beyond the human?
👉 www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english...

Multispecies Landscapes Lab - Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History How have humans historically cultivated practices of co-existence with other species? How have these interactions shaped the landscapes where humans have built, worked, lived, migrated, and wandered?

Interested in multispecies entanglements, more-than-human theory, or landscape histories?

📩 The group welcomes interest from scholars and collaborators - especially across disciplines.

Learn more:
www.hf.uio.no/iakh/english...

They ask:
📌 Who gets to shape a landscape?
📌 How are landscapes felt, cared for, or fought over?
📌 What kinds of multispecies knowledge do we overlook?

It’s an interdisciplinary effort to see landscapes not as static backdrops - but as shared, lived histories.

It’s not just about biology.

This lab brings together scholars from:

🧪 Environmental & medical history
📜 Philosophy & literature
🧭 Anthropology & archaeology
🕊️ Religious & cultural studies

All to rethink what a “landscape” really is - and who it includes.

How have humans co-existed with other species - in forests, fields, salt lakes, or cities?

This group studies the messy, entangled histories of living together - from microbial healing muds to grazing patterns, from spiritual practices to conservation struggles.

Multispecies Landscapes Lab - Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History How have humans historically cultivated practices of co-existence with other species? How have these interactions shaped the landscapes where humans have built, worked, lived, migrated, and wandered?

👣🌾 Landscapes aren’t just made by humans.

They’re shaped through relationships - with animals, plants, microbes, and even the soil beneath our feet.

Meet the Multispecies Landscapes Lab, a group at OCEH exploring landscapes as more-than-human worlds.

www.hf.uio.no/iakh/english...

Force sensitivity of multilayer graphene optomechanical devices - Nature Communications Graphene is a promising material for the design of mechanical resonators. Here, the authors fabricate a multilayer graphene resonator coupled to a superconducting cavity, to achieve efficient readout of mechanical vibrations and quantitatively investigate its force sensing performance.

So next time you walk through a forest, remember:
It may be more alive — and more connected — than you think.

📖 Learn more:
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/nco...

#ForestEcology #WoodWideWeb #EnvHum

And it’s not just chemistry.

Some mycorrhizal fungi also transmit electrical impulses — kind of like a forest nervous system.

We’re only beginning to understand how rich these connections really are.