Senses of Place

Ecology and place-conscious learning Ecological approaches to place and place-conscious education are  relevant when we engage in teaching for climate  change transformation. As a teacher educator, I am faced with  ecological precarity whenever I discuss global dilemmas of climate change and  unsustainability in subject teaching with teacher students.   To address climate change as an educational challenge, teachers need professional tools that contribute to building hope, collaboration, and support. Based on collaborative work and research with teachers in primary schools and kindergartens in the post-industrial community of Tinn and Rjukan in Norway, I reflect on experiences of and develop new thinking on nested networks, interdependencies, and interconnections arising from working reciprocally with place in teaching practices. Place is theorised as a situation where nature and culture co-produce each other, where place is habitat and a way to teach and learn,...

In the spring of 1997 one Norwegian newspaper wrote about a young woman from Spain who had walked from Oslo to the North Cape. A distance of over 2100 km. She made the headlines not only because she had walked the distance, but because she said she was walking in search of her own, personal north point. Her extraordinary journey caught my curiosity, and when I read about her, I knew I wished to talk to her to find answers to my questions: What is the north? What is so important about the North Cape? The reason for my curiosity was that I was researching the meanings of the North Cape, a place located in the northernmost part of Norway and a popular tourist destination for travellers and holiday-makers from all around the globe. I intuitively felt that there were answers to my questions in this woman’s journey, though I did not understand exactly what these might be at that point.  This is the start of the introduction to my boo...

Chora is a Greek word, and means place. Place is, just like nature and culture , a concept with many meanings, and there are several ways to understand place. Maybe it is time to begin to learn anew what place is, and what place means in our lives. There is a general tendency today to understand the world’s cultural and biological diversity as threatened. Place is a part of this diversity. Our human condition is rooted in the surroundings, that is, nature, place, and body. These are the material conditions for life. Many people experience placeless-ness and loss of place, which means a lack of rooted-ness in the surroundings. Placeless-ness is not only a modern phenomenon, while modern placeless-ness is, however, characterized by a crisis in the understanding of human surroundings. Placeless-ness is an attitude and a part of modern culture expressed through public planning, habitation, and settlement. It is ways of acting and thinking that we are socialized into over t...

New book: Cultural sustainability and the nature-culture interface: Livelihoods, policies, and Methodologies (Routledge, 2018), edited by Inger Birkeland, Constanza Parra, Rob Burton and Katriina Soini  Understanding how culture can act as a resource to promote sustainability, rather than a barrier, is the key to the development of cultural sustainability. This book explores the interfaces between nature and culture through the perspective of cultural sustainability. A cultural perspective on environmental sustainability enables a renewal of sustainability discourse and practices across rural and urban landscapes, natural and cultural systems, stressing heterogeneity and complexity. The book focuses on the nature-culture interface conceptualised as a place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledge meet, are negotiated, discussed and resolved. Rather than looking for lost unities, or an imaginary view of harmonious relationships between humans and nature based...

Dette er et utdrag fra mitt kapittel i "Maktens strateger" (Pax 2000) og den første boka i Makt- og globaliseringsutredningen redigert av Iver B. Neumann. Kapittelet har tittelen "Luce Irigaray: Mors makt". Det er på tide igjen å fokusere mer på forskjellsfeminisme, og Luce Irigaray har mye å bidra med her.  "Den franske lingvisten, filosofen og psykoanalytikeren Luce Irigaray har vært kjent en god stund i Skandinavia, men vi ser nå en ny interesse for hennes ideer. Irigaray er blitt tolket på mange måter av ulike grupperinger innenfor den feministiske forskningen, og hennes ideer har skapt stor debatt. Arbeidene hennes berører svært mange og store temaer, og de anvendes på fruktbare og forskjellige måter av forskere fra ulike fag. Hvorfor diskutere makt med utgangspunkt i Luce Irigarays arbeider? Makt er ikke et begrep Irigaray bruker svært ofte. Irigaray er egentlig mer opptatt av rettigheter enn av makt, hevder Margaret Whitford (1991b:184). Irigara...

Published in TICCIH Bulletin nr 69, 3rd quarter 2015 On the 5th of July, 2015, UNESCO has inscribed Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site on the World Heritage list. This represents great opportunities for the local communities of Rjukan and Notodden, located in the interior southern part of Norway. According to the proposal, the site is a unique expression of new industrial developments during the second industrial revolution, based in hydroelectric power production, industry, transport system and urban communities. The development of industry here depended however totally on the presence on the water landscape, so that the cultural and physical features of landscape here is a total production system (Birkeland 2015). How are we to value industrial heritage in the Anthropocene? The Anthropocene refers to the human-dominated, geological epoch that we are now living in. It is a concept that covers the last 250 years’ immense human impact on the earth where global warming, envi...