PhD research
The Moose and the Motor:
My PhD research (Goldsmiths 2016-2020) explored local experience of landscape and climate change in rural Northern Sweden, and how it is important to understand local climate scepticism in the context of environmental history, land-use, and national and global environmental discourses. In 2017-2018 I conducted fieldwork in Arjeplog and, along with 35mm photography, I used a number of experimental techniques as an anthropological method in my explorations of landscape.
In order to learn about ways of being emplaced in Arjeplog, and relationships to nature and landscape, I wanted to be more creative with photographic processes and play with different techniques of materiality. I used techniques including cyanotypes to explore the material trace interaction of object, light, and photographic surface, and pinhole cameras made in beer cans and left in place as part of the local landscape to record the tracks of the sun over time. Below are some examples of these practices. I explored the physical spaces of photography, both inside the camera and on tabletops and exhibition spaces - using my own and my participants’ images in elicitation sessions. This allowed me to use the ‘discursive space’ of the exhibition, as Bourriaud describes, to use my own practice to better understand local representations of nature and what was important to show about life in this particular place.
I have published this research in Visual Anthropology Review, Anthropology News, Anthropology Matters, Kulturella Perspektiv and the edited volume Disturbed Ecologies. This project was also featured in Nordiska Museet’s exhibition Arktis - medan isen smälter [The Arctic - while the ice is melting] and accompanying volume Arktiska spår: Nature och kultur i rörelse, which can be found here.
Funded by CHASE via the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
