A useful and meaningful stay
Why did you choose to exchange to the University of Oslo?
–The University of Oslo is highly-reputed and brings international students from different backgrounds to its campuses. The University is also in a city that caters to enthusiasts of city life and nature. MY INTPART was hosted by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSHEH) in 2022, led by Prof. Ursula Münster. My choice of the University and OSEH was connected to the engaged scholarship within the field of environmental humanities that the School conducts. For example, during my visit, Tim Ingold shared his recent work on education and sustainability at an event organized by OSEH. Apart from the invaluable lessons the talk conveyed, I had the chance to meet other leading scholars who attended the event.
I came with my two-year-old son and wife to Oslo, and this was our first trip together to a different country. It was good to know that while I was at the University, they could enjoy the city’s beautiful landscapes and explore the city together in our free time. Altogether those dimensions made my stay at the University useful and meaningful.
Creating professional networks with students and professors in similar fields
What has been the academic focus during your stay/what have you been working on?
–When I started my stay, I had planned to focus on turning one of my PhD chapters into an article and drafting a research proposal. I wanted to increase my publication outputs to boost my career and contribute to academia on topical issues in environmental humanities. And the research proposal was aimed at applications for postdoctoral applications.
The article I worked on dealt with land grabbing and dispossessions in central Mozambique and drew highly on the debates that OSEH promoted. It focused on the history of objectification and exploitation of land and human labour for monocrop production in central Mozambique and how that history shapes today’s local lives and economies. It was submitted to the Journal of Peasant Studies and is in the process of peer review (second round).
The research proposal followed the same thought and sought to understand the complex and contradicting effects of “failed” development projects with a special focus on biofuel monocrops in southern Mozambique, which in their glory days were hailed as being saviors of the country’s economies and nature. The proposal draws on the scholarship on the afterlives of development.
Apart from the academic focus, I also sought to create my professional networks with graduate students and professors at the University who worked in a similar field of interest. My visit coincided with the Environmental Humanities Festival, where OSEH’s research collaboratories presented their ongoing projects. The festival provided a glimpse at the extensive work the School was conducting and contacts to engage with in my academic career.
New perspectives on collaborative writing
What have been the benefits of your stay, both about work and your wider professional development?
–My INTPART exchange had significant impacts on my academic and personal lives. As a short context, I concluded my PhD studies in July 2021. Mobility restrictions were still enforced during that time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That made it so that a few opportunities existed for my postdoctoral activities.
The INTPART visit was my first experience engaging with colleagues without the intermediation of online platforms and my first travel abroad during COVID-19. So, INTPART was my first postdoctoral engagement on-site and provided me with a unique opportunity to engage with colleagues from different disciplines focusing on similar themes. As I stated earlier, UiO is a highly-reputed university and having the INTPART experience there boosted my academic career and augmented my attractiveness in academia. It both literally and figuratively expanded my frontiers.
On a personal level, the INTPART visit enabled me to meet with old friends who worked or studied at the University of Oslo and meet new ones. One of those new friends has partnered with me to compose an edited volume seeking to engage with the political thought of Kwame Nkrumah and motivate early-career researchers like us to engage with African scholarship critically.
Any surprising outcomes of your stay?
–One of the surprising aspects that emerged during my visit was the culture of collaborative and group tinkering that OSEH promoted. One example that resonated deeply with me was the informal group writing sessions. In those sessions, participants first briefly talked about what they intended to write that day and then set a time during which they wrote. In the end, they briefly talked about what they could write. Those sessions changed my perspective about writing as an individual and mostly isolated event. That understanding of writing has been my framework throughout my studies, only to discover the pleasures of togetherness and group support in writing. This motivated me to think of writing as more than generating outputs but as a process of tinkering and thinking that could be collective. Moreover, I was impressed by the collegiality and togetherness that graduate students build through creating events for fun, reminding us that we are academics and more.
About the project
Department of Social Anthropology has received NOK 10 million from the Research Council of Norway to build strategic collaborations in environmental anthropology with key institutions in the United States, Japan, and South Africa. This is part of the INTPART project.
The funding is in line with the government's Panorama strategy: Panorama strategy (2021-2027) - regjeringen.no.
As a result, the department has sent PhD and postdoc candidates on an exchange between the various institutions for research stays. So how has their experience been? And is the project working as intended, aiming at building new strategic networks and collaborations?
More interviews:
Jess Auerbach: A space for real reflection and invaluable feedback
Sonja Irene Åman: Exercising forgotten muscles through academic exchange