I am Professor and Chair of Gender, Nature, Culture at Link枚ping University. My research is grounded in gender studies, science and technology studies (STS), medical and environmental humanities, cultural studies, multispecies studies and corporeal feminist theory. The posthumanities are my method.
What counts as natural in a world shaped by environmental damage, human-induced climate change, toxicity, plastics, species extinction and warming oceans? What counts as human in a technological society where synthetic biology, generative artificial intelligence and digitalisation are reshaping our understandings of identity, life, the body and society at large? These questions are central to my research on the existential, ethical and more-than-human conditions that characterise our postnatural present.
Drawing on feminist theory, I develop analytical tools for understanding these relations and conditions, for 鈥渟torying exposure鈥� as I call it. Over the course of my research career, I have advanced Gender Studies as a societally relevant, interdisciplinary field. In 2005, I completed the first doctoral dissertation in Gender Studies in Scandinavia to examine the natural and the cultural in relation to genes and new genetics. It was also the first dissertation in Sweden to employ posthumanist perspectives grounded in feminist natureculture studies. Innovative interdisciplinarity is central to my work. I have also developed the posthumanities as an integrative interdisciplinary field connecting the humanities, science and societal relevance, and contributed to the development of the environmental humanities in Sweden. One of my specialisations within the environmental humanities is the blue humanities and environmental health.
For me, critical and creative posthumanities are like an unfinished community house with many interdisciplinary rooms, stairways and backyards. It is a postdisciplinary practice in which the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences meet. This is my methodological framework for exploring the ecologies, biologies and technologies that shape the world鈥檚 vulnerabilities and wonders. In 2008, I founded as my research group. In 2014, I initiated and became programme director of the Swedish national environmental humanities programme The Seed Box.
Research areas
My research spans fields and topics including the blue humanities, toxic embodiment and military waste in the Baltic Sea; forest biodiversity and how we might mourn disappearing species; sustainability in everyday life; ethical eating; and cultures of waste in times of crisis. Human and more-than-human cultural heritage in soils, oceans, landfills, food, bodies and databases, and along maritime coasts, are recurring themes, together with questions concerning the history of science and futures studies. How and when, after all, did science become scientific, and for whom? How did modern science separate culture from nature, and how should we think about this modern division in the future when it contributes to, rather than actually resolves, our entangled human and environmental problems?
I have also examined genetic conceptions of nature and 鈥渢he natural鈥�, as well as questions of the body, ageing, gender, sexuality and neurological conditions such as Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. Further areas include visual culture, the public use of science, generative artificial intelligence and feminist ethics of care.
Grounded shifts in perspective are important to me: changes in how we see and understand the world that grow from responsible relations with physical places, species, materials and histories. Knowledge is always embodied and physically situated.
The Posthumanities Hub and The Seed Box
Since 2008, I have been the founder and scientific director of The Posthumanities Hub, an extradisciplinary experimental platform for more-than-human humanities. The Hub is a feminist platform where scholars in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, as well as artists, meet across institutional, national and disciplinary boundaries.
Through research projects, international networks, artistic collaborations, visiting researchers, webinars and research schools, we create encounters among art, science, theory and society. The Hub brings together about 50 researchers at different career stages from around the world and has more than 20,000 followers on social media.
I was also the initiator and founding director of The Seed Box, Sweden鈥檚 national research programme in the environmental humanities, from 2013 to 2017, funded by Mistra and Formas. The programme brought together artistic practices, natural-science perspectives and humanities research around societally relevant environmental issues.
