projects
current projects
From virtual tourism to citizen science: Investigating how publics produce and consume datafied wildlife in Sweden
PIs: Erica von Essen (Stockholm University) and Jesse D. Peterson
funded by Viltvårdsfonden, Naturvårdsverket, Sweden
This project investigates the public’s changing relations to wildlife in a digital era of wildlife surveillance, web livestreams, and citizen science apps. Recognizing that encounters with wild animals are increasingly mediated via screens, we will examine what impacts digital practices with wildlife have upon human-wildlife relations and whether these interactions translate into non-digital encounters and outcomes. The latter includes impacts on conservation, input in management, and physical encounters with wildlife. We use a three-pronged method to apprehend 1) sites of production of wildlife imaging, in the form of field observations at recording sites; 2) sites of online consumption, through digital ethnography of web platforms where digital wildlife circulate and 3) in- person interviews with users. Our case studies correspond to different modalities for producing and consuming digital wildlife in Sweden, including streaming moose migrations for entertainment (SVT’s The Great Moose Migration) and uploading media to the Swedish Hunting Association’s upcoming platform Viltbild to inform wildlife management. We pioneer a digital ecologies methodology. This merges qualitative and quantitative methods and online and physical methods to capture how representations of wild animals travel from a physical form to data across various media. Our project will expose how various publics—hunters, urban residents, and hobby conservationists—produce, circulate, and consume digital wildlife and how these digital encounters unfold, with what real-life consequences. Through this research, we develop digital citizen science etiquette on wildlife surveillance that considers also different technologies and devices’ impact on new concerns like animal privacy. Also, we formulate recommendations for developers streaming wildlife to better match the needs and expectations of the public.
Farming the Seas: A More-than-Human Approach to Low-Trophic Mariculture
PI: Jesse D. Peterson
Many understand the seas as critical sites for transitioning current global food systems to more sustainable and just forms of nourishment (Bennett et al. 2021). In particular, many look to mariculture as containing the promise to increase food production, provide nutrient dense foodstuffs, fight climate change, and create more sustainable food cultures (Schubel and Thompson 2019; Troell et al. 2022). Scaling up mariculture, however, does not come without challenges. Increasing human reliance upon mariculture will create impacts on an ecosystem already “in peril” (Boehm et al. 2017). This project seeks to redress such conflicts by operationalizing a more-than-human lens within maricultural geography and theorizing oceanic space as sites of nourishment and by conceptualizing oceanic cultivation to complicate and make strange the “story” of aquatic organisms into diverse food commodity chains that serve sustainability and blue growth discourses.
Initial research for this project is set for publication in the special issue, "Sea Farming and Feminist Blue Humanities," edited by Jesse D. Peterson and Cecilia Åsberg for the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics.
upcoming projects
Not Just Knowledge: Emerging Environmentalisms in Citizen Science
PIs: Dick Kasperowski (Gothenburg University) and Jesse D. Peterson
Citizen Science (CS) represents a long practice in the sciences for enrolling a broad public in producing knowledge about natural environments and those creatures that inhabit them. However, in this contemporary era, CS platforms, data, and protocols represent a promise for more democratic and fair epistemologies and a tool for challenging hegemonic structures upholding the status quo. In particular, CS has become part of the global initiative of Open Science and deemed necessary for monitoring Sustainable Development Goals, installing trust in science and policy, and mitigating alternative facts and social polarization (Fraisl et al 2020). As a result, CS is becoming integral to environmental national and international policies and laws. Simultaneously, communities and groups create or (mis)use already established CS infrastructures, report systems, and protocols to protect biodiversity and ameliorate climate change (Van Oudheusen & Abe 2020, Kasperowski & Hagen 2022, Ottinger 2022). Discontent with policymakers’ inability to address future environmental threats, these engaged citizens contribute to or create environmental CS projects not only to advance knowledge about biodiversity but to achieve regulatory changes in solidarity with endangered ecologies. CS no longer serves the interests of science but has emerged as a vehicle for operationalizing different environmentalisms, or ways to care for and protect ecosystems. Hence, this research project aims to explore the many facets of environmentalisms occurring within CS around the globe. Specifically, it engages with how CS communities, data, practices, political ontologies, materialities, geographies, controversies, and representative abilities are working to resolve environmental challenges and disputes.
affiliated projects
PI: Finn Arne Jørgenson (University of Stavanger)
funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 872557
Envirocitizen is a project that aims to research how to encourage environmental citizenship through engagement with citizen science. The project is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 fund and will last for three years. The work is being coordinated by the University of Stavanger in partnership with: The Estonian Academy of Sciences, Cyprus Center for Environmental Research and Education, New Europe College, Radboud University, University of Extremadura, and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Citizen science has the potential to do more than create good science; it can create engaged citizens. Birding activities, in particular bird counting and bird ringing, have some of the longest citizen science traditions in the world. They hold great potential for developing environmental citizenship which encompasses the rights and responsibilities that individuals and collective society have toward nature. We aim to change the context in which existing collection happens in order to build more aware environmental citizens.
PIs: Camilla Brudin Borg (Gothenburg University), Roger Norum (University of Oulu), Suzanne Österlund-Pötzsch (Åbo Academy), John Martin (University of Plymouth)
funded by Swedish Riksbanken’s Jubileumsfond and NOS-HS (Nord Forsk)
One by Walking is a platform for collaboration, discussion, and experimentation within the area of research methodologies concerned with walking and experimental scientific and art-based work related to walking methodologies. The members of this network come from across various fields of the performing arts, pedagogy, social science, and humanities, each with a documented interest in the connections between bodies, landscapes, perception, sustainability, movement, walking and methodological innovation.
PIs: Roger Norum (University of Oulu), Jonathan Carruthers-Jones (University of Oulu)
funded by NOS-HS (Nord Forsk), Biodiverse Anthropocenes, and Academy of Finland
This project develops and organizes a series of transdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder workshops around the emerging use of creative and sensory methods and practices social sciences and humanities research. The four workshops take place in Helsinki, Tromsø/Kilpisjärvi, Oulu and Stockholm.