Please join us as we welcome Dr. Karen V. Lykke. She is an agronomist, ethnologist and holds a PhD in cultural history. She is professor of cultural history at the Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo.

Karen’s research interests pivot around the histories and ideologies of nature, focusing on environmental discourse and practice; agrarian and arboreal landscape studies; and social and cultural aspects of food. Her latest co-edited volumes are Denialism in Environmental and Animal Abuse: Averting Our Gaze. (Lexington Rowman 2021) and Changing Meat Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield 2022). Her most recent book is Live, Die, Buy, Eat: A cultural history of animals and meat (Routledge 2023, PB 2024) and Kjøtt (Res Publica, 2023), both co-authored with K. Bjørkdahl. Her ongoing projects are on the historical and contemporary relationships with non-human animals as food and the practice and science of regenerative farming.

The event is free, coffee and tea will be provided. No prior registration needed. Welcome!

Abstract

Within the last 150 years, animal husbandry and meat consumption has both changed and also increased dramatically in Norway, as it has in the world at large. Using Norway as a case, Karen explores how the industrialisation of meat production has led to an alienation which unfolds along three interconnected dimensions: the spatial, social, and cultural. Across various stages – from farming to dining – the link between living creatures and the meat on our plates has been severed, and this disconnect has also accelerated a series of changes within the agricultural sector and food system. Karen’s method involves a mosaic of detailed observations across different contexts, which she refers to as “agri-cultural studies”, and she will explain both this approach, the archival work ethnography and oral history that has fed into the process.