Lunch talk 3 May: Pleistocene actors in the Anthropocene

On 3 May, 12.15-13.00, our PhD candidate Karin Lillevold will present her project in a lunch talk at the Center for Climate and Energy Transformations (CET) at the University of Bergen. The title of the talk is “Pleistocene actors in the Anthropocene. Muskox, rewilding and social construction of nature in Dovrefjell”.

The talk is a hybrid one, and you can find the address or register for the zoom link here.

Here is what Karin writes about her project:

Nature and protection of it is not a straightforward matter. In Dovrefjell, practices from the past and the present demonstrates multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives of what nature was, is, or ought to be. As a national park the nature is on display and presented as a specific kind of nature with certain practices of “purifying” it and keeping unwanted things out or under control. Most importantly it is presented as nature per se. However, the landscape is much more controlled and designed than one would think at first glance.

In my doctoral project I will do ethnographic fieldwork in Dovrefjell national park in Norway to investigate how nature is performed through acts of protection and conservation. I focus on the muskox, a species that was translocated to the park from Greenland about 90 years ago and is now one of the most iconic symbols of the area. However, its existence in the landscape is full of paradoxes, as it can be seen as both a disturbance to “authentic” nature and a representation of wilderness. In this talk I will share some preliminary findings from my case study.