Guest lectures

In this guest lecture, Kimberley Thomas (Temple University) discusses how violence is intrinsic to infrastructure. She will illustrate this through examples of water and border infrastructures in the Ganges and Mekong Deltas.

Sakura Koretsune is a visual artist who seeks to reweave the stories between humans and cetaceans through embroidered images on textiles with texts in the form of journals and poems. In October 2022, she joined IKOS and Whales of Power as a guest researcher for one year with the support of the Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists of The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan. In this guest lecture, she presents the work she has done in Norway in the past 12 months.

On 15 June, C. Anne Claus will give a guest lecture on the ecological, gastronomic, and cultural transformations of seafood in contemporary Japan. All welcome!

Sakura Koretsune is currently in Oslo as a guest researcher in the Whales of Power project. She is a visual artist who collects stories of human-whale relations, and uses these as inspiration for embroidered images on textiles, as well as texts in journals and poems. In this presentation, she will introduce some of her art, and present her plans for research in Norway.

In this guest lecture, Peter van der Veer from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen will give a comparison of secularism in India and China, focusing on the idea of the secular as rational and on violence against religious minorities.

In this guest lecture, Lindsey DeWitt Prat, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, will give a talk on the rich cultural history of the sumo wrestler, focusing on the often obscured role women have played throughout this history.

In this guest lecture, Kathryn Dyt from the Institute of Historical Research in London will give a talk on weather rituals performed by the nineteenth-century Vietnamese court as a way to regulate rainfall and other natural events. 

In this guest lecture, Fynn Holm from the University of Zurich will give a historical perspective and comparison of the environmental knowledge of anti-whaling movements in Japan and Norway. 

In this guest lecture, Quoc-Thanh Nguyen from the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies will talk about Vietnamese fishing culture and whale worship. The lecture will include a short documentary film showing.