Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland

I hold a Master of Arts in Geography and Planning from Roskilde University, and finished my PhD 'Rebellious Waste & Food. Searching for Reparative Landscapes' in April 2019. I mainly work with collaborative and public ethnography; participatory, visual and performative methods; and situated knowledges and more-than-representational styles. This goes for my research practice and my teaching practices. 

I am interested in how humans bio-socially, affectively, bodily, and practically respond with environmental and climate change. I participate in the exploration of this question from a humanist background in philosophy, history, language and culture studies (Roskilde University, DK) and specialised in stories, storytelling, entanglements, mobilities, ecologies, food and cultural geography. I follow practices and thoughts related to multispecies diversity, coexistence and livability; (slow) activism, change and transition; care, affect and ethics; knowledge practices and makers; science, stories and technologies; cultures, ecologies and landscapes; biosocial collaborations and technologies; places, spaces and architectures. I wish to bring attention to a sensitivity and fertility of the complexity of lived life, practices of the mundane and more-than-human world making practices.

I am engaged with the practices outside university through collaborations, conversations, writings and thinking together as I find this utterly important, fruitful and meaningful. I am currently assisting the curator of the Venice Biennale 2019 themed ‘Connectedness’; I am connected with the ethnographic consultancy company carlberg/christensen; and writing with ‘The Preserve Journal’. Together with fellows, I am currently establishing a collective with architects, writers, gartners, performance artists, documentarists, curators and researchers to explore ecologies, coexistence and (more-than-human) care.

My PhD “Rebellious Waste & Food: Searching for reparative futures within urban-rural landscapes” takes its departure in the current situation of environmental and climate change and focus on food, waste and for what I identify as ‘reparative practices’ and  ‘response-abilities’. It is based on a multi-sited, interdisciplinary and collaborative fieldwork over three years in Denmark together with a small-scale local farm with chickens and eggs. Methodologically, I hinge on three different grips, inspired namely by Ursula K. Le Guin, Phillip Vannini, Donna Haraway and Andrew Abbott. The grips are: thinking with carrier bags, thinking with time stretching (thick presents) and working with the other-than-narrative. The study has been performed and presented by (eclectively) pulling, gathering different disciplinary theories, concepts, thoughts, experiences, and practices about natureculture entanglements into a bag of research. Some has been discarded, some have fermented, some have composted. In the search for abilities to respond to environmental change, this collecting- and communicating-practice indicates one of the essential points of my work: the search for the other stories of ongoingness and unrulyness can be found by moving and trying out different solutions on our ways; by significantly moving beyond disciplinary borders. Using the carrier bag as a recurring figure throughout the study has been about rethinking response-abilities and stories - real stories, stories of life, stories for living on, stories about ‘a chicken-and-egg’-situation. The PhD was funded by Roskilde University and The Danish Architecture Centre (with means from Realdania).