Sonja Irene Åman highly appreciated her stay at UC Santa Cruz.
Why did you choose to exchange to this university?
–UC Santa Cruz is an institution world famous for its environmental anthropology so I was very pleased to find out that UiO shared a connection with them through
INTPART. During my doctoral research I found the work of scholars like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing very useful, and I was excited to visit their home institution. UC Santa Crus is the home of the SEACOAST project headed by Tsing, as well as scholars like Andrew Mathews, which made it particularly relevant for my own work in customary marine tenure and the blue humanities. Through other INTPART members, I had also learnt that UC Santa Cruz was an excellent place for meeting other junior scholars working on similar topics to mine.
On top of the academic accolades, Santa Cruz is also located right next to the Monterey Bay marine biodiversity hotspot. Since my work focuses on whales, I knew Santa Cruz would be an excellent location for conducting small field trips. My timing was perfect as the famous spring gray whale migration season was at its peak during my stay.
Fresh research perspectives
What has been the academic focus during your stay/what have you been working on?
–I travelled to Santa Cruz just days after submitting my doctoral thesis. During my stay, I wanted to gain some distance from the very intensive last moments of my doctoral work and start developing a post-doctoral project. With advice and support from colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, I was able to explore topics for future research and think about both intellectual and practical ways of drafting a research proposal for submission to relevant funding bodies during the 2023 application rounds. In addition to future research, I used my time at Santa Cruz to go back to my doctoral thesis to edit and rewrite some of the chapters for publication. As mentioned before, I was also able to conduct a few whale watching tours and educate myself further on marine biodiversity and environmental management in the area. Conducting short field trips in Monterey Bay allowed me to collect some initial data for potentially developing further comparative research in the future.
What have been the benefits of your stay, both in relation to work and your wider professional development?
–First and foremost, receiving some advice and guidance from professor Andrew Mathews really helped me work through my plans for future research. Andrew was very generous with his time and attention, and he posed just the right questions to expand my thinking, which had been somewhat stuck after finishing my PhD thesis. More generally, sharing ideas and having conversations with colleagues at UC Santa Cruz gave me a lot of fresh perspective to take forwards. After 4 years at UiO, I have developed strong friendships and academic relationships with my colleagues, but it was helpful for my thinking process to have to ”explain myself” a little bit more once again. I particularly enjoyed a graduate seminar led by professor Mathews, as it brought together graduate students from different disciplinary backgrounds to discuss the politics of nature.
During my stay, I was able to get enough distance from my PhD work to start drafting my postdoctoral research proposal. The time at UCSC acted as an intellectual ”refresher” and introduced me to some fresh scholarship coming out the US in particular. A week after my return to UiO, I was able to send out my first postdoctoral application based on the draft I developed at Santa Cruz. In terms of developing professional relationships, I am happy to say that I will be staying in touch with professor Mathews and hosting him as a visiting lecturer for the EHS master’s certificate students upon his up-coming visit to Oslo. I also developed new friendships with other graduate students at UC Santa Cruz and hope to be able to encourage them to get to know INTPART and see if they have similar possibilities for collaboration with UiO.
A valuable opportunity
Any surprising outcomes of your stay?
–A surprising outcome of my stay was my realization of how necessary getting some distance is. My 6-week stay at Santa Cruz forced me to exercise some long forgotten muscles in approaching new people in a new place. After a 6-month period where I had been consumed by the PhD work in the race to finish, being able to make friends and have intellectual discussions outside of the context I had grown so used to really helped me feel more confident as a scholar. It’s hard to put in words, but I guess the closest comparison I can come up with is the feeling of stretching after realizing you have been sitting down in an awkward position for too long. I’m really happy INTPART gave me this opportunity to ”stretch” my brain and I’m pretty sure that I’ll feel the effects of it for a long time.
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?
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