Flora Mary Bartlett

Postdoc

My research examines landscape relations in the context of environmental change in rural Sweden using visual and ethnographic methods.

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 collaboration in the field and dissemination beyond academia. I have collaborated with the Nordic Museum on their exhibition The Arctic – While the Ice is Melting and their ongoing seminar series Forest Labs.

Life with Forest Loss

I am working within an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with Stockholm University entitled Life with Forest Loss; Renewed Relations and Ritual Re-enchantments, combining ethnographic fieldwork and visual methods to explore rural sites deeply troubled by forest loss and how people return to them. I am specifically exploring the toxic aftermaths and renewed more-than-human relations following chemical herbicide use and clearcutting in Northern Sweden/Sápmi.

Data Centers and Landscapes

I am working on 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, specifically in Sörmland, and move towards renewable energy. I am interested in the imaginaries and fears at play in this transition and how we can understand data centers’ intersections with other relations and local processes.

Publications

2023

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

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

Organisation

Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA)

In an increasingly complicated world, there is a need for researchers that can handle both breadth and depth, and can collaborate across disciplinary borders. Major societal questions are studied from an interdisciplinary perspective at TEMA.

Bilden visar byggnadsarbetare. The picture shows workers.

Technology and Social Change (TEMAT)

So much of our lives depend on technology. The development and use of technology creates possibilities as well as social, ethical and political dilemmas. That’s what we study at Tema T – Technology and Social Change.