University of Oslo (UiO)

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andrea nightingale photoProfessor Andrea Nightingale is a Geographer by training and presently a faculty member of the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
Her academic interests span political ecology, socionatures, critical development studies, feminist theory, and methodological work on mixing methods across the social and natural sciences. She feels passionately about theorizing new understandings of the society-environment nexus to account for power and politics within dynamic and unpredictable environmental change. She uses in-depth, fieldwork-based studies combined with interdisciplinary theorizing to work with ontological and methodological pluralism.
She focuses these passions around three main themes:
(1) Climate change adaptation and transformation in the context of development
(2) Public authority, state formation and collective action
(3) Emotion and subjectivity within environmental governance and communing
Andrea has worked in Nepal for over thirty years on questions of natural resource management, gender, caste and related environmental justice issues, and state transformation. She has also worked in Scotland on in-shore fisheries management. Her most recent work is focused on climate change adaptation and political change and has expanded to include comparative work in Kenya and Nicaragua.
Her scholarship has contributed to debates in feminist political ecology on theorising social justice, nature, commoning and environmental governance. She probes how intersectional social relations, including gender, race, caste, class and other axes of social difference (known collectively as intersectional subjectivities) are foundational to which management priorities are considered, who is expected to do what kinds of work to achieve environmental governance and sustainability goals. She is particularly interested in the possibilities for the transformation of inequalities and exclusions as collectives struggles over everyday governance practices.
Karen O’Brien is a professor in the Department of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo, Norway.

She works on issues related to global environmental change, globalization, vulnerability, climate change adaptation, and human security. She is particularly interested in how societies both create and respond to change.

Her research explores the ways that processes such as climate change, biodiversity loss and other large-scale environmental transformations interact with other global processes to exacerbate inequity, increase vulnerability and undermine sustainability. Moreover, she is interested in how integral theory and integral approaches can contribute to a better understanding of both the problems and solutions linked to climate change. Karen O’Brien leads the PLAN project on Responding to Climate Change: The Potentials of and Limits to Adaptation in Norway, and was also a Lead Author on the adaptation chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. Her interests in the project include the use of an integral approach for the investigation and implementation of socio-technical transitions, as well as the role of culture, values and worldviews for the ways in which such transitions are understood and carried out.

http://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/projects/solar-transitions/people/karenob.html

http://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/projects/adaptation/index.html