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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

ClimateCultures. Socionatural entanglements in Little Ice Age Norway (1500-1800)

Alternative title: KlimaKulturer: Natur og samfunn i Norge under den lille istiden (1500-1800)

Awarded: NOK 12.0 mill.

What happened the last time Nordic societies encountered rapid climate change? How did people react when they faced challenges similar to the ones we are confronting today? This project looks at the most recent period of major climatic shifts, the Little Ice Age (1500-1800). It reconstructs the climate history of this volatile period, explores how past societies adapted and tells these stories in a series of museum-based 'climate narration labs'. It does so because (past and current) climate change is not immediately perceptible. To better understand the statistical abstractions of modern science they need to be related to the repertoire of 'lived' human experience. To capture the broad impact of past climate change, the project pursues 'big interdisciplinarity'. It brings together climatologists, historians, and museum practitioners. This project reconnects the 'archives of nature' (tree-rings, ice-cores, etc.) and the 'archives of society' (historical records, material culture, etc.) that are often studied separately. Combining them, it reconstructs the cold and wet spells that characterise this period. The team targets clusters of extreme climate events in the 1690s, 1740 or 1770s that brought famine and poverty to Nordic communities but also triggered new welfare and public health initiatives. Following the Little Ice Age?s impact from 'agriculture to culture' the project will challenge popular narratives of collapse and decline and map the unexpected plurality of past responses to climatic change. The aims of the project are therefore threefold: It will a) establish a cooperative, 'socionatural' model for the reconstruction of past climates and their impacts, b) fill current knowledge gaps by relating climate change to human experience c) provide critical reflection on the available repertoire for climate adaptation.

In order to make climate science relevant, statistical abstractions need to be related to human lifeworlds. This project draws on 'lived' experiences of past climate change to situate current challenges. It asks: What happened the last time northern societies encountered rapid climate change? How did climate and culture interact during this Little Ice Age (1500-1800)? What can we learn from the ways people adapted to similar challenges in the past? Current research is, however, limited by historians and climatologists studying their fields in isolation. As a result, contemporary debate on historical climate experiences is often informed by popular imaginaries of 'decline', 'famines' and 'collapse' (Hulme 2011). In contrast, this project implements a dedicated socionatural approach to study and disseminate past climate adaptations. It will programmatically bring together climatologists, historians and museum practitioners in an agenda of 'big interdisciplinarity'. The projects focuses on the Little Ice Age as the most recent and best documented period of historical climate change. It centers on Norway and its neighbours as high-latitude regions produce particularly significant records. Its integrated research design covers the entire process of establishing and integrating the 'archives of nature' (sampling tree-ring data) and the 'archives of society' (historical records) to disseminating the findings in a series of 'climate narration labs' in Oslo’s upcoming Klimahuset (Climate house). The project aims to broaden current technology-centred discourses, establish a novel socionatural approach and provide much-needed examples of 'lived' climate adaptation to safeguard against simplistically 'predicting the past'.

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam