LUCSUS seminars

Autumn programme 2025

The programme is updated continuously. 

August 28

Performing science? Working with, in, and across places and scales
11-12 in Maathai
Speakers: Emily Boyd, Joshua Garland, Emilia Ganslandt, Alicia N’guetta, Elisabeth Schill, Tilly Laestander, and Joyce Soo

In this interactive seminar, we explore and reflect on our collective work in relation to the question: How do we perform science across different places and scales?

The seminar invites us to think not just about what we do, but how we do it. Are we navigating the world primarily as scientists, collaborators, advocates, or performers? What does it mean to engage ethically, responsibly, and effectively when working across diverse contexts, scales, and communities?

Through discussion and reflection, we aim to unpack the tensions, opportunities, and responsibilities inherent in conducting research in interconnected and complex spaces.

September 18

Energy Use and Transition in the Industrial Sector: A Case Study from Nepal
11-12 in Maathai
Speaker: Sudhindra Rajsharma

The industrial sector is the second most energy-consuming sector in many developing countries, surpassed only by the residential sector. However, data on energy use in the industrial sector is generally lacking. This study examines the dynamics of the industrial sector by generating primary data on energy use and transition in Nepal. Through a survey covering over 600 industries and enterprises in Nepal, including large, medium, small, cottage and micro-scale enterprises, the study explores the energy challenges faced by the industries. Beginning with the overall composition of energy used in industries, the study examines the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy in Nepal. It explores the extent of power outages, their implications on turnover and revenue, along with energy efficiency mechanisms currently in use. Using the survey findings to inform the private sector (industry representatives along with hydropower and solar PV developers) and the state (concerned ministries, departments, commissions, and regulatory bodies), and soliciting their suggestions, it then recommends the measures that could be adopted to overcome the current energy challenges. The study was carried out under the research project "DOUBLE TRANSITIONS: Connecting climate goals with local realities of Nepal: analysing changing energy poverty and access patterns in the era of climate change".

Weaving knowledge(s): Addressing climate change through epistemic crafting
13-14 in Ostrom
Speaker: Manuhuia Barcham

The last half-century has seen a dramatic shift in Western academia and practice around the recognition of Indigenous Knowledge (IK). We see examples of this shift in the adoption of IK in health management programs or the granting of legal personhood to mountains and rivers. However, multiple critiques have emerged around this shift, seeing it as often still being situated within specific socio-technical power structures that continue to be extractive in practice. Investigating these ideas through examples drawn from my empirical design work, I propose different ways to explore, bringing together different knowledges and knowledge traditions in a way that provides value for multiple stakeholder groups, while maintaining the dignity and integrity of these traditions and knowledges.

Manuhuia Barcham (Ngāti Hori & Ngāti Hineiwaerea) is Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Emily Carr School of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. His latest book, Co-Designing Environmental Management Futures, is scheduled to come out later this year.

September 25

Geographies of Everyday Governance as Pathways to Sustainable Development?
11-12 in Carson
Speaker: Glyn Williams

Glyn Williams's research asks how development processes can become more responsive to people facing social, economic, or political marginalisation, focusing on the 'everyday governance' of development. Working with academic partners, Williams has undertaken extensive qualitative fieldwork in India and South Africa, examining the ideas and motives behind development projects, the practices of government and other actors engaged in implementing them, and how these are reworked and contested on the ground.

In this talk, Williams outlines some of the research's theoretical inspirations and the practical contexts to date. Recurring themes within this work are the importance of 'conflicting rationalities' between those designing development interventions and their intended 'beneficiaries', and the importance of more participatory forms of governance if these conflicts are to be overcome. Although Williams has not taken environmental issues as a direct focus of his recent work, he concludes with reflections on possible connections between everyday governance and building more sustainable cities.

October 9

Stefan Schüller's first-year PhD seminar
10-12 in Carson
Speaker: Stefan Schüller

Stefan Schüller is a doctoral student at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) and a PhD researcher within the PERENNIAL project funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 2023).

The project investigates whether a shift from annual to perennial grain crops as the basis for food production is possible, and what the major opportunities and obstacles for such a 'perennial revolution’ in agriculture are. As part of the project, he will focus on exposing and better understanding the current political economy of agriculture and its (deliberate) dependence on annual grain crops, while subsequently exploring what potential strategies for change could look like.  

October 16

The Ghost within the Forest: Campesino Settlers and Environmental Ruination in La Chiquitanía
11-12 in Maathai
Speaker: Frederik Andersen Tjalve

In this seminar, Frederik Andersen Tjalve discusses the entanglements between campesino and Chiquitano communities and extractivist-fueled environmental devastation in the rural landscapes of La Chiquitanía. He begins by relating the context of my fieldwork, and how the figure of the campesino ghost settler evoked in media and NGO representations of the causes of ecological devastation and land trafficking in La Chiquitanía brought me to the San Martin Colonies, a cluster of communities with whom he has conducted long-term ethnographic research on campesino and indigenous territorialities within landscapes undergoing rapid agrarian extractivist transformations amid the political, socio-ecological, and monetary crises of Bolivia. He describes how histories of migration within the Bolivian Lowlands shaped the image of the campesino settler and White-Mestizo Cruceño resistance toward these communities and the MAS government, framing settlers as ghosts through the use of remote sensing and environmental governance discourse. Zooming in on the San Martin Colonies, he then seeks to rearticulate campesinos and Chiquitanos as actors in their own right. Sketching out how relations to soil, commodities, fire, machines, and community, territory, and the state are evoked within campesino and Chiquitano communities, he draws these metabolic entanglements together within the landscape of La Chiquitanía. He sketches out how extractivist epistemologies through technology, bureaucracy, and the interlocal connections of agrarian extractivist trajectories come to shape ruination and exploitation as an anticipatory response of campesinos to environmental devastation.

Frederik Andersen Tjalve is a PhD candidate from the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, currently visiting the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. 

October 23

When Adaptation Meets Resistance: How to Shape Climate Policy from Below
11-12 in Maathai
Speaker: Ana Maria Vargas

Climate adaptation is often framed as urgent and inevitable — yet in many communities, especially those living in poverty, it is met with quiet defiance, legal challenges, or outright sabotage. This seminar explores how resistance emerges in response to top-down adaptation measures, from rejecting drought-resistant crops to contesting relocation plans in informal settlements. We will examine the role of law, everyday acts of resistance, and grassroots organising in reshaping climate policy from the ground up.

November 6

Building “Restoration Futures”: From Ecological Repair to Creative Transformations
11-12 in Carson
Speaker: Harry W. Fischer

Restoration has become a key environmental agenda of the present era, exemplified by the UN’s current Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021-30) and pursued through a host of policies worldwide. But what does it mean to “restore” a landscape? Existing paradigms of thought understand restoration as a process of ecological recovery, yet provide only limited guidance on the ends toward which restoration should be pursued. In this talk, I develop the notion of “restoration futures”, which frames restoration as a contested and value-driven process of building more sustainable and thriving landscapes. I discuss some of my existing research on why large-scale target-driven restoration often fails, and why more empowered local governance can encourage success. I then present an emerging framework for studying restoration futures, followed by preliminary findings from a large comparative analysis of restoration values and aspirations drawn from cases in 20 countries globally. A futures lens makes explicit diverse aspirations and value conflicts, with potential to support more creative and democratic decision-making on restoration goals: what we wish to recover from the past, what aspects of the past we may seek to undo, what we strive to keep from the present, what futures we hope to avoid, and what we aspire to achieve. Toward which futures should we restore?

Harry Fischer is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor (Docent) in the Department of Forest Ecology and Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Originally trained as a human geographer, he has held positions in the United States, India, and Australia. His current work looks at local natural resource governance, climate vulnerability and adaptation, and the social dimensions of forest and landscape restoration.

December 9 (Tuesday)

Art-based affective pedagogy as part of the Rights of Nature movement. Presencing ecohabitat, unlearning extractive overview effect
11-12 in Carson
Speaker: Martin Hultman, University of Gothenburg

Central to the six-year research program exploring Rights of Nature for water bodies, funded by Formas, we arrange Transition Labs (known as 'Vätternting') with committed and concerned groups of people who live and work with Lake Vättern. At our meetings, we use a textile representation of the elongated, sea-like Lake Vättern, which is passed gently around the participants standing in a wide circle marked with stones from one of the lake’s shores. The aim of this presencing ceremony, including the art-I-fact, is to create a shared, solemn experience and to invite participants to engage in a very concrete process of unlearning the extractivist overview effect. In this seminar, some preliminary thoughts on this pedagogy will be discussed based on a work-in-progress paper, which will later be published in a Special Issue of the journal Lagoonscapes. 

Professor Martin Hultman, University of Gothenburg, leads a multi-year research program called "Whose Body of Water?" that explores how Lake Vättern could be recognised in its own rights. Hultman is widely published in research areas such as climate and energy, particularly regarding gender. He has been named the most influential researcher in Gothenburg, the Linköping University alumnus of the year and a finalist for the Book Fair's Education Prize.