About the project
Valuing weeds: Cultivating Norwegian seaweed and making it good
Valuing weeds investigates the cultivation of Norwegian seaweed. Wild-harvesting of seaweed has been an established industry in Norway since the post-war years, but in the past decades, seaweed cultivation has emerged as a promising new industry with a potential of becoming both profitable and environmentally beneficial. The project traces how this potential has been constructed in reports and papers written by Norwegian seaweed researchers, and how has become a reference point for both research projects and private actors attempting to realise this potential.
In addition to studying the reports where this potential was first crafted and presented, the project builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the multiple sites where Norwegian seaweed is cultivated: A seaweed farm in Norway; a commercial seaweed seed supplier; a research laboratory where the genetic make-up of seaweed is sought to be optimised; and industry conferences where researchers and industry leads come together to present their projects and latest developments and to discuss how to develop the industry further.
Weeds of value is part of the research project Value threads (PI: Kristin Asdal). The hypothesis of Value threads is that the economy is currently undergoing a change – or a set of changes – consisting in the inclusion of new forms of value into the economy, in mixing the qualitative and the quantitative, and in integrating nature and the living in the economy in unprecedented ways.
Valuing weeds relates to this overarching project by providing insight into the concrete practices with which actors attempt to integrate seaweed in the economy by modifying its biology, valuating seaweed and seaweed cultivation as good in a more-than-economic sense, and by experimenting with accounting for moral and ecological value(s) and with converting them to economic profit.
Thesis supervisors
Professor Kristin Asdal (TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo)
Associate Professor Frida Hastrup (SAXO-Institute - Archaeology, Ethnology, Greek & Latin, History, University of Copenhagen)
Commentators
Associate Professor Maximilian Fochler (Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna)
Associate Professor Tone Druglitrø (TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo)
About Marie Stilling
Marie Stilling is a PhD candidate at the TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. Her PhD project is part of a research project funded by the Research Council of Norway called Value threads. The project is led by Kristin Asdal at TIK and carried out in collaboration with the CSI - Centre de sociologie de l’innovation at École des mines in Paris.
How to participate
The seminar is open to everyone, but please register by sending an email to Lara Kristiansen lbkristi@tik.uio.no by 15 February 2024.
Click here to join via ZOOM.
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Lara Kristiansen lbkristi@tik.uio.no.
Welcome!