The EH research group is a collaborative and transdisciplinary research platform at Roskilde University, dedicated to exploring and developing the humanities’ potentials for addressing climate change, human-nature relationships and other environmental topics. Key areas of interest include collaborative and transdisciplinary methods in environmental humanities, green transitions, temporalities, action and activism, and place and belonging. 

We are interested in relationships between people and their environments, the relations of nature and culture, and how climate change relates to society and culture, in pasts, presents and speculative futures. Working from a pluralist approach to knowledge creation, we engage with various knowledge disciplines and practices and seek to foster dialogue between research disciplines, research and civic society and across established hierarchies and norms. We aspire to be an inclusive and inspiring space for sharing new ideas and work-in progress, and welcome researchers on different career stages. Our meetings are open to researchers, environmental practitioners, artists and activists.  

Research themes

Currently our research group explores the following themes: 

1. Temporalities, pasts, presents and futures. We seek to understand environmental history and temporalities and how notions of nature, climate and environment have changed over time. We also engage with speculative futures, exploring imaginaries in literature and the arts.
2. Action, agency, activism. We understand agency and activism in relation to climate change and the green transition. We are preoccupied with social and environmental sustainability, labor and commons, and we explore more-than human notions of agency to form new ideas of slow activism, regeneration and cohabitation as possible alternatives to predominant forms of climate action and politics.
3. Place, belonging, landscape. We seek to understand how different temporalities and cultural practices form places and landscapes: We investigate commoning in urban and rural practices how labor and activism can create a sense of belonging beyond place-making. Our focus is on human-nature relations and cultural practices in landscapes and in peoples’ and fellow species’ sense of belonging.

Activities in the group 

• Reading and discussing state-of the art literature in Environmental Humanities, aiming at positioning the research group within Environmental Humanities internationally and developing transdisciplinary theories and methods specifically for the group.
• Work-in progress paper presentations with a special focus on supporting young researchers within the field of Environmental Humanities.  
• Collaboration with national and internationally established researchers in EH, artists, activists and civic society.  
• Joint conference papers, panels and workshops.

Research group leaders: Kristine Samson and Linda Lapina