Photo of Flora Mary Bartlett

Flora Mary Bartlett

Postdoc

My research examines landscape relations in rural Sweden, studying the ways places are lived, experienced, claimed, and contested in the context of environmental change and sustainable futures.

My research

As a visual environmental anthropologist, I work at the intersections of human-environment relations and creative visual methodologies, bringing landscapes into image making and utilizing curation as a research practice. I am especially interested in the frictions that emerge over landscapes, environmental discourses, and renewable infrastructures, including different ideas of what is sustainable, for whom, and on what scale. Visual practice opens up research methodologies in inclusive and creative ways, fostering dissemination beyond academia.

My current research is part of the project Megabytes vs Megawatts: Understanding Infrastructural Frictions between Data Centers and Energy Grids for Sustainable Digitalization. I examine the emerging landscape relations and frictions as data centers expand their presence in rural Sweden and move towards renewable energy. What are the imaginaries at play in this transition? How do they intersect with other energy imaginaries?

I have previously studied landscape relations in the rural North of Sweden, including frictions surrounding hydropower infrastructures and the rejection of national climate discourses, and have researched contested forest relations in Sweden and in the Nordic Museum collections. I received my PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London and have since been a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich and Guest Researcher at the Nordic Museum, Stockholm. I collaborated with the Nordic Museum on their exhibition The Arctic – While the Ice is Melting and on their seminar series Forest Labs.

Publications

2023

Flora Mary Bartlett (2023) Freezers full of gold: Living well with landscape in rural Northern Sweden Kulturella perspektiv - Svensk etnologisk tidskrift, Vol. 32 Continue to DOI
Flora Mary Bartlett (2023) Visualizing the Pristine: the role of imagery in local stewardship of landscape Disturbed Ecologies: Photography, Geopolitics, and the Northern Landscape in the Era of Environmental Crisis, p. 25-44

Organisation