This open access book shines a light on how and why academic work became entwined with air travel, and what can be done to change academia’s flying habit. The starting point of the book is that ...flying is only one means of scholarly communication among many, and that the state of the planet now obliges us to shift to other means. How can the academic-as-globetrotter become a thing of the past? The chapters in this book respond to this call in three steps. It documents the consequences of academic flying, it investigates the issue of why academics fly, and it begins an effort to think through what can replace flying, and how. Finally, it confronts scholars and scientists, students, activists, research funders, university administrators, and others, with a call to translate this research into action.
Live, Die, Buy, Eat. These words represent a chain of events which today is disconnected. In the past few years, controversies around meat have arisen around industrialization and globalization of ...meat production, often pivoting around health, environmental issues, and animal welfare. Although meat increasingly figures as a problem, most consumers’ knowledge of animal husbandry and meat production is more absent than ever. Tracing a historical process of alienation along three distinct axes, the authors show how the animal origin of meat is covered up, rationalized, forgotten, excused, neglected, and denied. How is meat produced today, and where? How do we consume meat, and how have our consumption habits changed? Why have these changes occurred, and what are the social and cultural consequences of these changes? Using Norway as a case study, this book examines the dramatic changes in meat production and consumption over the last 150 years. With a wide range of historical sources, together with interviews and observation at farms, slaughterhouses, and production units, as well as analyses of contemporary texts and digital sources, Live, Die, Buy, Eat explores the transformation of animal husbandry, meat production and consumption, together with its cultural consequences. It will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, geography, and history with an interest in food, agriculture, environment, and culture.
Norway’s “nation brand” rests on the notion that this country is characteristic for its inclination to do good on the world stage. This brand is at risk of being exposed as hypocrisy, however, since ...Norway demonstrably also causes harm. In this chapter, I focus on the work that goes into maintaining Norway’s image as a good power. I will argue that a key mechanism of such maintenance work is the strategic production and management of ignorance, a phrase that refers to various forms of secrecy, selection, or suppression of information. As an extended illustration, I provide a reading of the TV series Nobel, which details a whole catalogue of Norwegian vices and crimes, and which fictionalizes how those vices and crimes are hidden or marginalized. But if Nobel might thus appear to be a hard-hitting piece of national self-criticism, I suggest that its effect could actually be the exact opposite: In line with its tragic form, what Nobel ultimately offers its viewers is a momentary – self-critical – venting ritual, after which everything can return to normal.
Learning and accountability are customarily defined as ‘the dual purpose’ of development aid evaluation, yet this notion is contested. Based on an overview of the existing literature, we identify ...four ideal type positions in this debate: (1) accountability and learning are complementary objectives, (2) there is a reconcilable tension, (3) there are problematic trade-offs and (4) the two are irreconcilable. Drawing on empirical evidence from Sweden and Norway relating to evaluation processes, evaluation reports and evaluation systems within the sector of development aid, we conclude that pursuing this dual purpose in practice involves trade-offs which need to be recognised. We end with implications for aid evaluation policy and practice.
World expos are occasions for the type of rhetorical display known as "epideictic," and as such, they provide glimpses into how a nation wants to be seen at a particular point in time. In this ...article, I probe into Norway’s pavilion at the 1992 expo in Seville, Spain, for answers to what Norway wanted to be in the early 1990s. I will argue that Norway’s pavilion, a “deconstructed structure” that centered on a somewhat ambiguous pipe, signals a country in the process of reinventing itself under the aegis of petroleum. More specifically, I suggest that Norway’s ’92 pavilion can be read as an early instantiation of rhetorical techniques that would later become key to Norway’s claim to being both a leading petroleum producer and an environmental frontrunner. The pavilion itself pulled off this balancing act in much the same way that politicians and others would later learn to handle it – by techniques of rhetorical association and dissociation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969 1958). Having chosen “the cycle of water” as the overarching theme for the exhibition, the makers of the pavilion (the largest sponsor of which was the state oil company, Statoil) managed to make petroleum safe by renaming it “offshore” and by associating it, also in many other ways, with water. The pavilion’s deconstructive architecture can thus be understood as an early validation of the rhetorical practice of “putting together” and “taking apart” to make new things that serve the nation’s interests – in this case a “cycle of water” in which petroleum was a natural part. Although I posit only similarity, and not causality, the rhetorical techniques of Norway’s ’92 pavilion were in this way strikingly similar to what later became a stock argument, e.g. that Norway offers “the world’s cleanest petroleum” (see Ihlen 2007).
The increasingly industrial character of meat production has entailed significant changes to the relations we have to the animals we eat. In this article we first describe some of the practices and ...rituals that characterized slaughter in Norway up to the first decades of the 20
th
century. In this period, Norwegians drew on rituals to make the killing of an animal meaningful and acceptable. Then, by exploring the original impetus toward "humane slaughter" in the early to mid-20
th
century, we show how ritual transformations of animals into meat gave way to laws and regulations to justify animal killing. Finally, we provide a contemporary example of how far this "judicialization" of animal killing has come, and argue that this process has enabled the widespread denial of the animal origin of meat.
This book provides an in-depth investigation into the practices of animal housing systems with international contributions from across the humanities and social sciences. By attending to a range of ...different sites such as the zoo, the laboratory, the farm and the animal shelter, to name a few, the book explores material technologies from the perspective that these are integrated parts of a larger biopolitical infrastructure and questions how animal housing systems, and the physical infrastructures that surround central human-animal practices, come into being.
World expos are occasions for the type of rhetorical display known as "epideictic," and as such, they provide glimpses into how a nation wants to be seen at a particular point in time. In this ...article, I probe into Norway’s pavilion at the 1992 expo in Seville, Spain, for answers to what Norway wanted to be in the early 1990s. I will argue that Norway’s pavilion, a “deconstructed structure” that centered on a somewhat ambiguous pipe, signals a country in the process of reinventing itself under the aegis of petroleum. More specifically, I suggest that Norway’s ’92 pavilion can be read as an early instantiation of rhetorical techniques that would later become key to Norway’s claim to being both a leading petroleum producer and an environmental frontrunner. The pavilion itself pulled off this balancing act in much the same way that politicians and others would later learn to handle it – by techniques of rhetorical association and dissociation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969 1958). Having chosen “the cycle of water” as the overarching theme for the exhibition, the makers of the pavilion (the largest sponsor of which was the state oil company, Statoil) managed to make petroleum safe by renaming it “offshore” and by associating it, also in many other ways, with water. The pavilion’s deconstructive architecture can thus be understood as an early validation of the rhetorical practice of “putting together” and “taking apart” to make new things that serve the nation’s interests – in this case a “cycle of water” in which petroleum was a natural part. Although I posit only similarity, and not causality, the rhetorical techniques of Norway’s ’92 pavilion were in this way strikingly similar to what later became a stock argument, e.g. that Norway offers “the world’s cleanest petroleum” (see Ihlen 2007).
Sammendrag I artikkelen undersøker vi sentrale norske myndigheters håndtering av H1N1 – pandemien i 2009, med vekt på den eksterne kommunikasjonshåndteringen. Vi viser hvordan myndighetenes ...kommunikasjon utad ble formet gjennom samvirket mellom politisk lederskap, forvaltningsmyndighet og faglig kyndighet. Et sentralt mål i myndighetenes kommunikasjonsstrategi var å snakke med én stemme og sikre et enhetlig og klart budskap utad. Men balansen mellom åpenhet om usikkerhet om pandemiens videre utvikling og behovet for handling og iverksetting av tiltak, var en kilde til uenighet internt. Vår analyse indikerer likevel at nettopp differensieringen mellom de ulike myndighetsaktørene, og klarhet om rollefordelingen mellom dem også i den utadrettede kommunikasjonen, kan være av vesentlig betydning for en vellykket krisekommunikasjon.
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