Research themes

The project Cattle Crossroads explores ways to envision and generate a new research basis for a future green livestock production in Denmark. Merging anthropology with veterinary and animal science, the aim is to identify and proactively repurpose the theoretical and practical knowledge that conditions Danish cattle production.
Researchers: Frida Hastrup, Signe Skjoldborg Brighel and Nathalia Brichet.

In this project Nina Toudal examines schisms of dry and wet soils. Wetting of low-lying soils to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could be one of agriculture’s most important contributions to a carbon neutral future. However, wetting agricultural land works against centuries of agricultural drainage and agricultural practices. Therefore, this project analyses the historically contingent ideational and material barriers to wetting agricultural peat soils. To do so, the project analyzes the material and practical consequences of the Soil Improvement scheme in use between 1920 and 1966, through to the current debates on abandoning agricultural production on lowland carbon rich peat soils by flooding drained landscapes.

Geographically, the project takes its starting point in the Aamosen in West Zealand, while the project begins chronologically with the Soil Improvement Act in 1921 [Lov om Grundforbedring, 1921]. The act was intended to support land improvement, including drainage. In this framework, the project seeks to investigate, through interviews, archival research and field visits, how the past landscape was imagined as marginal and uncultivable, which needed to be changed and was changed.

The project hypothesizes that the historical legacy of past drainage schemes has created a firm common understanding of Denmark and Danish agricultural soils as dry and accessible for intensive cultivation. This perception might hinder wetting and thus the reduction of greenhouse gases from agriculture. It is therefore not enough to identify where the carbon-rich peatlands are through mapping and data collection, one must also understand their past and connections with current use to strengthen the restructuring of agriculture. This requires a longer historical perspective on the creation of the dry land, as well as an understanding of purely local conditions that land and soil are embedded in.

Sustainable agrifood systems necessarily depend on interconnected more-than-human worlds as well as approaches that work across varied fields such as animal welfare and anthropology. Projects such as the COST ACTION LIFT: Lifting Farm Animal Lives, where Katy Overstreet is a leader on two sub-working groups, aim to develop and apply more sustainable modes of studying and supporting farmed animal flourishing. Cattle make worlds and have been important companion species in world-making projects of empire, capitalism, rewilding, and more. Nathalia Brichet, Signe Brieghel, Frida Hastrup, and Katy Overstreet conduct research on agricultural co-species relations of humans and cattle in dynamic landscape transformations. 

Through the project Agroforestry - a way towards a more sustainable agricultural system Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup explore how historical precedents, economic structures, and current policy frameworks hinder or enable the adoption of agroforestry. 

With the project Regenerative agriculture's effects on soil Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup aim to better understand, measure and translate the effects of regenerative agriculture on soil, thereby producing and qualifying adequate metrics for regenerative agriculture in Danish real-life settings so that the farming system may find a way into agricultural policies. 

For a very long time, private ownership has been regarded as a cornerstone of Danish agriculture. However, in recent years it has come under intensified pressure due to factors such as increased farm sizes, increased debt in agriculture, the dependence of investments that push in the direction of large-scale operations, problems of generational change etc., as well as the arrival of new forms of proprietorship. Simultaneously, there has been increasing pressure for the agricultural sector to shift towards sustainability in the light of climate and biodiversity crises.

In the project Farmland ownership and transitions in agriculture Signe Mellemgaard explores the implication of different sorts of farmland possession on transition in Danish agriculture.  It aims to assess how various forms of ownership (the owner-operator family farm, tenancy, leasehold, company investments, cooperatives, collectives) impact the ability of farms to implement changes in their operations.  Furthermore, the project will examine the relevance of key concepts, including property, production, freedom, self-madeness, memory and history in these processes. 

By adopting a historical perspective, the project will investigate the relationships between distinct ownership model and significant transformation in agricultural practices over time; from the establishment of widespread freehold ownership to land reforms and the establishment of large numbers of small holder allotments to the massive structural changes in Danish agriculture over the past 50 years. The objective is to derive insights concerning the interplay between forms of possession and condition for transformations in land use and operation, both historically and in the present day.

Transform is an ambitious interdisciplinary project with the specific aim to support and optimize the transition of the Danish landscape according to the “Agreement on a Green Denmark” (Den grønne trepart) from 2024.

The project consists of different workgroups, among which Signe Skjoldborg Brieghel,  Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup work with Land Use Histories through cultural-historical analysis and ethnographic studies. This workgroup combines legal analysis with cultural-historical and ethnographic studies in Living Labs, to understand how historical and societal conditions influence today's opportunities for green transition. 

In this project Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen and Niklas Olsen trace the emergence and consolidation of technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage, Power-to-X, and Bioenergy in a Danish context by looking at various actors, infrastructures - both material and epistemic - as well as the imaginaries they convey. The project explores how these specific technologies permit a status-quo utopia by promising to sustain growth regimes while preserving the image of Denmark as a green pioneer.

Afforestation is a key element in contemporary efforts to reduce net carbon emission and human-caused climate changes. However, the idea that we can impact the climate by altering the woodlands is no new one. In the PhD-project Forests and climate change: afforestation and climate change-debates in Denmark 1860-1940 Mathias Nielsen investigates, how the connection between afforestation and climate change developed, was debated and incorporated into public debates in Denmark 1860-1940. In this period, Denmark saw a vast increase in afforestation, and debates among scientists, foresters and other actors about how these many new forests affected the climate arose. The alleged connection between forest and climate became part of public debates of the period; among others about the efficiency improvements of Danish agriculture as well as potential health benefits.

The project aims to explore how knowledge about this forest-climate-connection came into being and was circulated into broader societal issues at the time. The main interests of the project are thus to expand on the evolution of the idea and knowledge about human caused environmental- and climate changes, and to add insight into how environmental knowledge and science intertwine with the political and societal. Lastly, it is the hope that the project will provide a historical backdrop to current plans in Denmark to raise 250.000 ha of forest towards 2045 – among other arguments – in order to reduce human caused climate change.

Post-industrial landscapes fit awkwardly between discourses of wild nature and wastelands. As part of an ongoing experimental practice in transdisciplinary slow research, Katy Overstreet and Tim Flohr Sørensen conduct ethnographic, more-than-human, archival, arts-based, and archaeological research in a local green space along with a motley and dynamic meshwork of others. They explore a common in central Copenhagen, Denmark, which has been subject to exploitation and urban development for about a century, including as military exercise grounds, cattle grazing pastures, nature reserve, landfill, leisure space, and urban expansion. Especially, the construction of a new neighbourhood on 18 of the 223 hectares commons has been particularly contested ever since the planning of the project was initiated in 1990. Whether arguing for or against urban development of the commons, the area’s past is employed actively by stakeholders, and this research initiative relates these political implementations of the past to the historical and archaeological remains nested in the landscape, including the ways in which they are implicated in the present. See for example Unnaming the common: landscape encounters in the Anthropocene.

In the project (current title) Living with the Sheep Dyke of North Ronaldsay: Making sense of an ‘organically evolving monument’ in a changing landscape Margaréta Hanna Pintér explores the values, meanings and identities that are refracted by the Sheep Dyke, a drystone dyke/drystone wall on the island of North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island in Orkney, Scotland. The Sheep Dyke is construed as an ‘organically evolving monument,’ which speaks to the adaptive capacity of the structure and the community that has taken care of it for multiple generations, but also significantly complicates its heritage status as a Category A listed building by Historic Environment Scotland (HES).

The project traces the ways in which different facets of the Sheep Dyke feed into its nature as a shifting structure since its origins in 1832. Thinking with the ways in which the Sheep Dyke assembles a regime of caretaking around itself in both human and more-than-human contexts, the project considers the ethical implications of a structure that is simultaneously enclosure, barrier, landscape, ecology and heritage. Furthermore, the project explores the way in which a drystone wall encircling the northernmost island of Orkney, the Sheep Dyke of North Ronaldsay, has been lived with in the past; made meaning with in the present; and made sense of for the future as a continuously evolving structure.

In this project Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen and Nathalia Brichet investigate post-mining ecologies, local engagements, bioremediation, and the production of scientific knowledge in colonial contexts. The project is based on fieldwork across two arctic sites: Southern Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi in Northern Sweden where extensive fieldwork and community engagement is planned.  The project focuses on post-industrial landscapes, toxic heritage, and environmental justice. Funded by Nordforsk.

The global environmental disaster we are verging on calls for investigations of how the urgencies of more sustainable futures shape our present. To enable societal transition towards sustainability we need to understand why, how, and when sustainable futures are practiced – or not – within the mundane routines of shopping, eating, cleaning, sorting waste etcetera.

Sustainable futures are materialized in the choices of consumption and in the materials of mundane objects such as plastic. In everyday life, near futures and the immediate present as well as cherished family traditions may compete with distant and dystopian futures reaching beyond one’s own lifetime. Yet, everyday activism also enacts micro-utopias of hope and transition. Through ethnographic investigations of Danish households, the project Everyday Sustainable Futures by Tine Damsholt aims at providing a better understanding of how sustainable futures are practiced in contemporary everyday life.