About the event
In this talk I propose that we need to recognize and discuss three different types of transdisciplinary research in the humanities: the many, the one, and the collective. Drawing on examples from work I have done in the environmental humanities, I discuss how scholarly work moving across disciplinary borders can occur when scholars with different backgrounds bring their discipline-specific answers to a question into conversation (the many), when an individual scholar reaches into a toolbox across disciplines to answer a question (the one), and when scholars from different starting disciplines work together to come to radically different answers than their individual disciplines would have (the collective). None of these is more or less valuable than the others, but distinguishing among them allows us to understand how transdisciplinarity works in practice in the humanities. This has implications for what we envision the humanities of the future would look like.
About the presenter
Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History at University of Stavanger, Norway. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and co-directs The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at UiS. Her current research agenda focuses on cultural histories of animal extinction and recovery, particularly the implications of extinction for cultural heritage and museum practices. Her book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging was published by MIT Press in 2019. She has published widely, including four co-edited volumes: New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (2013); Northscapes: History, Technology & the Making of Northern Environments (2013); Visions of North in Premodern Europe (2018); and Silver Linings: Clouds in Art & Science (2020).About the Symposium
As the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) starts its 5th year, the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) is organizing a symposium on “Transdisciplinary in the Environmental Humanities” on 6 and 7 September 2023 to highlight and celebrate the innovative environmental humanities research happening in Norway and neighboring Scandinavian countries, especially by early career researchers. Read more about the programme for the symposium here.