EH Research at AU

No single discipline has a full grip on engaging with environmental transformation and uncertainty, which is why environmental humanities research projects span a wide variety of disciplines, topics and approaches. Such projects stretch out across Aarhus University and bring together a variety of scholars.

While we feature examples of larger EH research projects, CEH is not driven by such projects. Rather, core to CEH is a broader commitment to environmental humanities research and fostering a CEH community of researchers at all career stages. In order to be affiliated with CEH, it is in no way a requirement to be affiliated with a large project - it is only necessary to have an interest in some aspect of the environmental humanities. A number of our affiliated researchers conduct important research outside the scope of traditional research projects, often as part of their studies, PhD work, or collaborations with art institutions and/or other civil society groups.

Present research projects

Plastics and the Anthropocene: The Bads Associated with the Goods We Consume

How are risks related to plastics experienced, thought about, and responded to in different contexts? This research project aims to explore what people in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines find to be the benefits and risks of using plastic food containers and bottles and what they find to be the advantages, risks, and constraints of different methods of disposing of the resulting plastic wastes.

Living Labs. An Interventionist Ethnographic Approach to Technologies of the Future

Living labs are an increasingly important experimental research and innovation method that engage users as co-creators of new technologies, products and services in open real-life communities and settings, including environmental ones. This project, funded by the Independent Research Council of Denmark, runs from 2018-2023.

BLUE: More-than-Human Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis

Invasive species
Plastic pollution
Ocean warming
Ocean acidification

BLUE combines a "blue humanities" approach with natural science methods to retool the empirical, multispecies study of four key anthropogenic-ecological crises of oceans: invasive species, plastic pollution, ocean warming, and ocean acidification.

Fencing the Feral

This project investigates how the construction of a wildlife fence to prevent the migration of wild boars and the spread of African Swine Fever has generated radical transformations of the social and natural landscape in the Danish-German borderlands.

REGREEN: Fostering nature-based solutions for equitable, green and healthy urban transitions

Nature-based solutions
Education
Children
Nature
Participation

REGREEN is a large international EU project designed to promote urban liveability by fostering nature-based solutions to urban environmental challenges in both Europe and China.

A Green and Sustainable Port: Port Effectiveness and Public Private Cooperation for Competitiveness

The aim of this project is to identify key factors affecting current sustainability efforts at Tema Port, Ghana, along with new measures necessary to ensure that future environmental sustainability initiatives at Tema Port achieve genuine sustainable solutions rather than displacements of problems from the port itself onto other areas, including both marine surroundings and maritime hinterlands.

CliFVac: Towards Climate Friendly Vacation Practices

Climate friendly vacation
Socio-cultural benefits
Climatic/sustainability concerns and transition

CliFVac is a Green Transition research project, that investigates and supports socio-cultural transition towards climate friendly vacation practices.

Muskox Pathways: Resources and Ecologies in Greenland

Entangled Anthropocene realities and relations
Decolonization of ecosystem management
Generating new value around muskox

Muskox Pathways: Resources and Ecologies in Greenland uses a single species – the muskox – to retell an Arctic natural-and-cultural history including the deep entanglements between natural ecosystems and social forms, Muskox Pathways marks a shift in the scientific approach to Arctic resources and sustainability.

ANTHEA: Anthropogenic Heathlands

Anthropocene ecologies
Heathland historical trajectories
Deep-time disturbance ecologies
Multispecies entanglements and land-use

Anthropogenic Heathlands: Disturbance ecologies and the social organisation of past resilient landscapes, explores how people can self-organise around land held in common and devise resilient structures of governance.

Global Trout: Investigating environmental change through more-than human world systems

Conservation and the environmental humanities
Complex histories
Species introductions
Global transformations

Global trout addresses large questions by studying the colonial spread of trout from Britain across the globe in the second half of the 19th century, and the social and natural consequences in places such as South Africa, Argentina, Japan as well as in the UK.

FOCUS: Centre for Food Culture Studies

This Centre - focused on food, eating, and agriculture - includes substantial debates about topics ranging from sustainable food systems to eco-gastronomy.

Past research projects

ECO-GLOBAL: Innovative Approaches to Ecological Globalization: Anthropology on the New Pangaea

Introduced species and management
Cross-disciplinary research
Global environmental change

ECO-GLOBAL research group focuses on ecological globalisation - i.e. how practices of trade, development and management remake ecologies by connecting geographically distant places and hopes to contribute to better understanding of the causes and effects of global environmental change, one of the urgent issues of our times.

AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene

Novel transdisciplinary research in the Anthropocene
Unplanned and unintended ecologies
Human disturbance

Headed by Niels Bohr professor and anthropologist Anna Tsing, the project aims to open up a novel and truly trans-disciplinary field of research into the Anthropocene. Applying insights and methods from anthropology, biology and philosophy, the project focuses on the 'co-species landscapes' that humans and other species come to co-inhabit in the Anthropocene.