UiO - Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities

17/12/2025

It’s been a semester shaped by many shared conversations and encounters across OCEH. As the year draws to a close, we are happy to share our third newsletter with you.

This edition captures a cross-section of our recent work - bridging music, anthropology, food systems, and environmental art. We’ve also included some end-of-year reflections on winter traditions and a first look at the new research groups joining us in 2026.

📸 Captured Moments: A look back at our recent gatherings at Tøyen Hovedgård and our final lunch seminars of the year.

✨ New Voices: Introducing visiting researcher Hauke Ohls and interviews with our latest blog contributors.

🌱 Looking Ahead: Early details on our Spring 2026 program and our new research pages.

❄️ A Bit of History: Why Christmas was once banned in England and how the Christmas tree emerged in Germany.

Read the full newsletter here: https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/oceh-newsletters/OCEH%20Newsletter%20%233%20December%202025

We’re so grateful for the lively energy everyone brought to our seminars and sessions these last few months. Wishing you all a restful break and a wonderful start to the new year!

11/12/2025

Time for our final gathering of 2025! We're excited to wrap up the semester with a special combo: our Lunch Seminar + an informal Julegløgg Social!

On Monday, Dec 15th (12:15 PM), join us in the OCEH Lab as Sadie Menicanin takes us to fin-de-siècle Vienna with her talk: "The Air of the Vienna Woods." Learn how poetic motifs of rustling leaves and fresh air in popular music connected to Vienna’s quest for better air quality around 1900. It's a beautiful intersection of musicology and environmental humanities!

We'll be serving non-alcoholic gløgg, pepperkaker, and treats to celebrate the season ☕🍪

Feel free to bring your lunch as usual.

Hope to see you there for a sweet send-off to the year! 🌲

Sadie Menicanin — The Air of the Vienna Woods / Die Luft vom WienerwaldForest air and music in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

08/12/2025

🎄 Did you know Christmas was once banned in England?

In 1647, England’s Puritan-led Parliament outlawed Christmas celebrations - no church services, no festive gatherings, no decorations. They believed the holiday had pagan origins and encouraged wasteful indulgence.

Meanwhile, in 16th-century Germany, a different tradition was taking root: people began bringing evergreen trees indoors and decorating them - an early version of the Christmas tree we know today.

Over time, these customs merged into what’s now a global tradition.

🌱 From prohibition to pine-scented nostalgia, the Christmas tree is a powerful reminder of how culture, nature, and belief intertwine. A perfect example of what environmental humanities help us explore.

04/12/2025

New Blog Post Alert! Meet Sadie Hale, Sensing the Ocean Through Whales 🐋

We have a fascinating new blog post for you 👇

Ever wonder what it's like to sense the ocean through a whale's perspective? We are absolutely thrilled to introduce you to our visiting researcher, Sadie Hale, a PhD candidate whose work explores the fascinating, multispecies encounters between humans and whales in the Norwegian Arctic and beyond!

Drawing on her experience as a whale-watching guide and her background in anthropology and literary studies, Sadie is looking at how we listen to the ocean and make stories with these magnificent animals. Her research is the perfect blend of science, humanity, and adventure — from 500-year-old Greenland sharks to the ethics of interspecies relations.

Dive in now to learn more about Sadie's interdisciplinary journey, her favorite things about environmental humanities, and what she's working on while here in Oslo: https://shorturl.at/BHh2t

P.S. If you're in Oslo, you can meet Sadie and hear her present her work at a lunch seminar tomorrow! Just drop by: https://shorturl.at/hQNUA

Narrative arcs and constitutive absences in whale tourism.

02/12/2025

Hello December! ✨

The year may be winding down, but OCEH still has a full little bundle of curious, atmospheric events to brighten the dark days. Grab a warm drink and join us for some end-of-year inspiration:

5 December
Storytelling with(out) Whales with Sadie Hale 🐋
Whales, narrative twists, and what it means when the main characters decide not to appear.

8 December
From Dust to Dust with Amita Baviskar 🌫️
A deep dive into Delhi’s dust, pollution, and why a major public health issue often fades into the background.

15 December
The Air of the Vienna Woods (with julegløgg!) with Sadie Menicanin 🎶
Forest air, fin-de-siècle music, and the atmospheres shaping Vienna around 1900.

Come warm up with us and enjoy a bit of December thinking before the year wraps up.

All events: https://shorturl.at/8Vteh

10/11/2025

🌿 We have exciting news! 🌿

OCEH has just launched our new blog - a space for stories, ideas, reflections, and ongoing conversations from across our community.
✨ Visit the blog here → https://shorturl.at/50jHU

This is where we’ll share glimpses of what’s happening within OCEH: research in progress, guest perspectives, collaborative experiments, and the everyday moments that shape our work.

To start things off, we’ve published our first post, introducing the blog and its purpose:
📝 Welcome to the OCEH Blog → https://shorturl.at/2cSlA

We’re also delighted to share our first interview:
🎙️ Where Literature Meets the Living World - a conversation with visiting researcher Stefano Rozzoni on literature, ecology, and creative collaboration.
Read it here → https://shorturl.at/CjZn6

We hope you’ll explore, reflect, and follow along - and feel free to reach out or share ideas. This blog is meant to grow through conversation 💬

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 environmental humanities today.

03/11/2025

November at OCEH 🍂

This month at the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities, we invite you to explore how environments, bodies, and cultural practices shape one another across agriculture, art, and coastal histories. We look forward to welcoming you!

18 November
Lunch Seminar with George Cusworth - Digitally Mediated Planetary Encounters and the Making of a Metabolic Subject

How do everyday dietary habits scale up to reshape landscapes and planetary systems? This seminar explores new data-driven approaches to sustainable diets and the forms of environmental responsibility they encourage.

📍 OCEH Lab, P.A. Munchs hus
🕛 12:15–13:00 (Bring your lunch — coffee served)

27 November (morning)
Symposium: Curating ‘the Wild’

Join us at the National Museum for a discussion on art, ecology, and curatorial practice with Isabelle Gapp and Dehlia Hannah. Together, we consider how museums and art historians can engage meaningfully with climate and environmental change.

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

27 November (afternoon)
Talk with Wanda Marcussen - New Approaches to Coastal Histories

How can we write coastlines and coastal life in ways that centre more-than-human relations? This session shares emerging methodological approaches to multispecies coastal history.

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

🔗 More details on all events: https://shorturl.at/vnBSN

30/10/2025

🍂 Autumn at OCEH - our second newsletter is out!

This edition gathers moments from the past months at the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities - shared conversations, fieldwork and workshops, new research groups beginning to take shape, and visiting researchers who are adding new perspectives to our community.

The newsletter offers a small window into the ongoing work and curiosity that connect us here: across disciplines, across projects, and across ways of thinking about our environments.

✨ Read the newsletter: https://shorturl.at/PeJVa
💌 Subscribe for future editions: https://shorturl.at/tooRE

We’d be very happy if you have a look - and even happier if you share it with someone who might be interested.

21/10/2025

🌿 Two thought-provoking OCEH Lab Talks this week!

Tomorrow, Stuart Earle Strange (National University of Singapore / University of Oslo) joins us to explore one of the most fascinating and slippery ideas in the environmental humanities - anthropomorphism.
Using examples from human–macaque encounters in Singapore, he’ll ask: what happens when we think of anthropomorphism not as a mistake, but as a way of cooperating and relating beyond the human?

🗓️ Oct. 22, 12:15–14:00
👉 https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/events/oceh-events/lab-talks/2025/stuart-earle-strange-what-is-anthropomorphism-huma.html

—

On Thursday, we welcome Karin Wagner (University of Gothenburg), who will discuss her ongoing book project Packaging Design: Sustainability, Aesthetics and Social Issues.
Her talk, “The plastic in which we live,” looks at how everyday packaging shapes our habits, values, and sense of beauty - and what it reveals about the social and environmental dimensions of design.

🗓️ Oct. 23, 12:15–14:00
👉https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/events/oceh-events/lab-talks/2025/karin-wagner-the-plastic-in-which-we-live.html

Come by for two engaging lunchtime sessions that stretch how we think about cooperation, creativity and the materials that shape our shared world.

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 relating.

09/10/2025

🌳 Can trees really talk to each other?
Not with words — but with networks.

Beneath the forest floor, trees are connected by tiny fungal threads (called mycorrhiza) that link their roots. Through this underground network, they can share nutrients, send distress signals, and even support young seedlings.

It’s sometimes called the “wood-wide web.”

When one tree is attacked by pests, it might send chemical warnings to others nearby. And older trees have been shown to “feed” younger ones in need — a kind of quiet cooperation scientists are still trying to fully understand.

Even more fascinating? Some fungi transmit electrical impulses — hinting at a level of complexity we’re only beginning to explore.

🌿 Forests aren’t just collections of trees — they’re deeply connected communities.

📚 Read more:
👉 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12496

07/10/2025

Brace yourselves — it’s a full week at the OCEH Lab 🌿

If you’re curious about how culture, environment, and society intersect, here’s what’s happening this week:

Wednesday, Oct 8 – Workshop: Pollution-Generated Poetry?
What happens when air pollution data enters the process of poetry production? Visiting scholar Stefano Rozzoni presents and tests an experimental AI prototype that turns air quality data into poems, inviting participants to explore what happens when numbers meet culture. Bring your device and join the experiment.
🔗 https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/events/oceh-events/other-events/2025/pollution-generated-poetry-a-prototype-across-ai-l.html

Thursday, Oct 9 – Lunch Seminar: Erling Agøy — Early Modern Chinese Approaches to the Weather
How did people understand and respond to climate change during the Little Ice Age? Erling Agøy takes us to 17th-century China, showing how local societies made sense of weather, calamities, and resilience in a changing world.
🔗 https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/events/oceh-events/lunch-seminars/2025/lunch-seminar-livelihood-local-identity-lore-%E2%80%93-ear.html

Friday, Oct 10 – Lunch Seminar: Eli Skogerbø — Green Growth and Sámi Stakeholders
What happens when “green growth” meets Indigenous rights? Eli Skogerbø discusses how environmental politics, resource extraction, and Sámi agency intersect in northern regions — and what that means for the future of sustainability and justice.
🔗 https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/events/oceh-events/lunch-seminars/2025/lunch-seminar-eli-skogerbo-%E2%80%94-green-growth-and-sami.html

All events take place at OCEH Lab, 4th floor, P.A. Munchs hus, University of Oslo.

Feel free to bring your lunch — coffee will be ready ☕

A week of ideas, reflection, and conversation — see you at the Lab! 🌍

Read this story on the University of Oslo's website.

30/09/2025

🍂✨ What a month we have ahead of us at OCEH! From poetry born out of pollution to Sámi law and multispecies justice, October is full of inspiring workshops, lunch seminars, and lab talks.

We’ll be exploring weather, ecology, cooperation, and human-environment relationships — all through fresh and thought-provoking perspectives.

Bring your curiosity, mark your calendars, and join us for a month of ideas that will spark conversation long after the talks are over. 🌿📚

Find out more on our website: https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oslo-center-for-environmental-humanities/