Creative Approaches to Environmental Humanities

Seminar with visual anthropologist Albert Osbæck Adelkilde, the Arctic University of Norway and PhD student Margaréta Hanna Pinter, Centre for Sustainable Futures.

Milking

We will have a film screening of Albert Osbæck Adelkilde’s film “Milking” and hear about his work with environmental humanities through filming. “Milking” is a visual anthropological film set on a modern conventional dairy farm in Denmark. It explores a network of everyday interactions between humans, animals, and technologies. With a sensorial, observational approach, the film shifts focus away from the human and allows other presences to come forward: robots, cows, flies, spaces and sounds. It is a filmic experiment in making non-human actors visible on their own terms, and in exploring whether coexistence can be expressed without relying too much on human language. The film traces how care, control and agency take shape between species, bodies, and machines.

“Once you come to the Outer Islands, nothing is straightforward”

The Sheep Dyke is a circa 20 km long drystone wall that is said to encircle North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island of Orkney (Scotland). The material continuity implied in encirclement is misleading however, as in reality the Dyke is a perpetually incomplete boundary that has undergone a nearly continuous cycle of repair and ruination throughout its existence since 1832. Because of this inter-generational concern with its upkeep, the Dyke has become an important and inseparable feature of the terrain of North Ronaldsay and has, as many ruins, become naturalised, despite being a built feature of the landscape. Margaréta think with this structure to explore the intensified temporal relationships on the island that are in many ways made more noticeable through this structure which is haunted by its own traces and history.

Postdoc Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen, Centre for Sustainable Futures, will moderate the following QNA.

Student Forum will provide some glögg.

Everyone is welcome. Registration is not required but to be included in the refreshments please email, Tilde Stege Rasmussen, jgn681@hum.ku.dk, by December 5 2025.