–?Which research project are you most preoccupied with?
– My ERC Starting Grant project “Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene” – or as we call it within our team: the AMBER project. We are nearing the mid-way point of the project, and it is a particularly exciting time because all team members are on long-term fieldwork in disparate places around the world. It’s been extremely rewarding to hear from them about their ongoing research, the stories they are uncovering and the directions in which fieldwork is taking them.
–?What do you hope to find out?
– The project, as the name suggests, focuses on amber: a term that indicates a variety of fossil resins of different origins, and which have been produced across distinct time periods in the earth’s history. Some of the older amber we work with has been found in the Italian Dolomites, and it is over 200 million years old. Two members of our team are also working with amber found in today’s Chiapas, which is as young – in geological terms – as 15 million years.
– As a team we follow amber across multiple places: the mines where it is extracted and the beaches where it is foraged, the workshops where it is crafted into jewelry and the fairs in which it is sold, as well as the scientific laboratories in which it is studied for what it can reveal about the evolution of life on our planet. Through amber we aim to do more than to just follow a commodity chain. We aim to conjoin a study of present and pressing issues related to extraction and global trade, with a novel understanding of the earth and its history.
– Why is this important?
– The relevance of what we do lies in our current planetary predicaments: an era – what has been termed the Anthropocene – in which humans (or at least, some humans) have become geological agents, capable of altering the earth systems at a scale that we have little understanding of.?
– The AMBER project, working as it does across radically different temporalities, tries to help us developing analytical tools to better think at this planetary level. And amber is a fascinating companion to think with – challenging, as it does, some of the key categories that we oftentimes use to understand the world we live in: organic and inorganic, geos and bios, life and death. Amber shows the limits of those categories, it urges us to challenge them.
–?Who are you collaborating with?
– I am working with what has become a rather large research group, comprising two postdocs, a PhD student, one MA student, and a few affiliated researchers. And while we all work in different places – Burma, China, Lebanon, Mexico, Poland, Italy, the Dominican Republic, and more – we also think closely with one another, through regular meetings, events, and various activities.
– We also collaborate with other colleagues at UiO – last semester for instance we co-organised an event with the ERC project ECOART led by Anna Grasskamp (IFIKK) – as well as with researchers and institutions outside of UiO, in the various countries in which we do research. Some of those collaborations already resulted in public events and workshops in China, Italy, and Lebanon; and through such collaborations we are also working on a series of podcasts that will illuminate some key aspects of our research.
–?What do you look for when choosing collaborators?
– The perfect collaborator is someone who works independently and efficiently, and that at the same time thrives when thinking collectively and collaboratively. I love working with people who bring a lot of creative energy with them: people who have ideas for new sub-projects, events, research avenues, and the like; and who enjoy sharing those ideas and working on them together with others.?
– I think that for a team to be successful its members have to enjoy spending time together – and this is a quality that takes time to build, and that relies on a disposition that cannot be reduced to academic expertise alone.
–?What other research projects are you involved in?
– I am one of the PIs on a consortium project funded by HERA-CHANSE called “Knowledge in Crisis: The dynamics of environmental expertise amidst rural change.” The overall project includes 17 researchers across six European universities, and ten associate partners across various fieldsites.?
– At UiO, together with one postdoc, we are working in two areas: northern Italy and eastern Germany, addressing the cumulative crisis of environmental expertise and investigating how this relates to broader processes of societal disenfranchisement.?
– What we look at, put it another way, is how changes in both rural landscapes and how people relate to them are imbricated with broader socio-political development (and particularly the rise of populist movements).
–?What do you think is the most interesting aspect of being a researcher?
– Research feels like an incredible privilege for the access I am often given to truly exceptional stories and individual lives. I have met so many fascinating characters and places through my amber research that I would have never got to know otherwise – this is what I truly love.
- More on the "Amber" project