Matti Weisdorf

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Current research

After an exciting year focusing on understanding local resistance to various forms of green energy interventions (Engaging Communities in the Green Fuels Transition), 2024 has seen me commence on CARNAL: Eco-ethical articulations of body, meat, and flesh, where I, in collaboration with theologians and (other) anthropologists, will try to map and understand lived ecological ethics in the encounter human beings and the something more-than-more. More specifically, I seek to understand the disagreements that seems to almost inevitably arise in the establishment of Danish nature national parks by exploring the different ethicalities that are staged and challenged in the pursuit of new and wilder nature.  The project is supported by VELUX FONDEN. 

My PhD project, entitled For the Love of the Living: A Rubber-boot Quest for the Biocene in Aarhus, Denmark, explores the ethically and politically charged lives of a community of vociferous biodiversity-championing biologists and traces how ecological thought travel and mutate as such biologists-cum-eco-activists move from the university setting through sites of civic engagement to the intricacies and conundrums of everyday life. From this empirical jumping-off point, the project investigates the ways in which ecological sensibilities, attunements, and respons-abilities are configured and cultivated through and sometimes despite of the scientific practices of the so-called science of life.

The project was part of the Enchanted Ecologies in Scandinavia project that provided new ethnographic accounts of the cultivation of enchantment in nature-oriented experiences among self-declared secular people in Scandinavia. The overarching project also developed new ways of theorizing enchantment and explored how enchanted moments in different ways may relate to ethical and political concerns.

Fields of interest

Nature, environmental humanities and philosophy, ecologies, environmental ethics, energy ethics, war veterans, conflict, Sri Lanka, Denmark