David Harnesk

Research Interests

I am interested in what causes environmental problems, their underlying social drivers, how they can be addressed, how collective action and social movements try to address them, and how academic knowledge can contribute to such social and political mobilization. My research covers two intersections of theoretical inquiry: between environmental and economic geography, and between social movement theory and social theory. This requires interdisciplinary and action-oriented sustainability research, which represents a cross-cutting methodological theme in my research and teaching.

A central theme in my research concerns social well-being and ecological sustainability in transformative change, in short, sustainability transformations – what constitutes them and how they can be realized. My empirical research focuses on a number of questions related to land: who owns it; what do they do with it; how is it controlled and managed; how is it transformed and how is that contested? My recent work examines these questions through forest ecologies and peoples’ relation to them, principally, but not exclusively, in the boreal region of Northern Fennoscandia and from within the struggles of reindeer pastoralists among the Indigenous Sámi people.

Research Projects

I am the principal investigator for the 3-year project called Embracing extreme weather and compound events in landscape planning: the case of reindeer husbandry in Northern Sweden. The project is funded by Formas, and includes Umeå University, Stockholm University, and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

I am the principal investigator of the 3-year international post-doc project called Sámi social movements – indigenous mobilization around the ecological conditions of reindeer husbandry under climate emergency. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council and I will be based at Lund University, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Copenhagen University.

I am a researcher in the 4-year project called Overstocking or Encroachments? Interrogating the political ecology of land use conflicts on Sámi lands. The project is funded by Formas, and is hosted by the Stockholm Environment Institute.

I was part of the now concluded project Climate Change Resilience in Small Communities in the Nordic Countries (CliCNord), coordinated by University College Copenhagen. I was the case leader of the Lund University division, where we focused on how reindeer herding communities can build capacity to deal with basal ice formation. The project was funded by Nordforsk and more information can be found on this website.

Teaching

Since 2012 I have taught and supervised master - and bachelor students at Lund University. I am the course coordinator and teach extensively in the course on Social Movements and Sustainability. I have similar experiences in the courses Gender and Sustainability in Theory and Everyday Life, Sustainability and Popular Culture and Sustainability and Sustainable development from a local, regional and global perspective. I also teach at the PhD course on Philosophy of science for the social sciences at the Social Science Faculty, and I supervise group assignments in the course Climate, Science and Society. I have also supervised many students taking the course Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science: Master’s Thesis. Other courses where I have taught include: Urban & Rural Systems and Sustainability; Economy and Sustainability; Energy and Sustainability; Governance of Sustainability; Social Movements and Sustainability; Deciphering Landscape; Historical Aspects of Development; Gender, Global Development, and Postcolonialism; Forest & landscape biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services; Political Ecology; Social Science Lab; Methods for Climate Risk Management; Environmental Science: Industrial Environmental Economics, and; Environmental Science: Instruments for preventative environmental protection.