Fine Brendtner - New PhD at the Department of Anthropology
Fine will be affiliated the research project: BLUE – Multispecies Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis “ where she will be working on the sub-project: "Ocean Acidification and Marine Worlds in the Antarctic Ocean”
Fine Brendtner is a new PhD research fellow with BLUE – Multispecies Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis. Fine holds a BA in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Free University of Berlin and a MSc in Visual Anthropology from Aarhus University / Eye and Mind Lab (2020).
For her MSc thesis Ocean Matters, Fine has conducted ship-based fieldwork together with the Icelandic Marine and Freshwater Research Institute on their visual survey cruise, mapping seafloor habitat and vulnerable marine ecosystems in the subpolar waters around Iceland. Her study combined insights from visual anthropology, marine science and recent scholarship on the more-than-human in order to re-position the role of imaging practices, as well as that of vision in embodied research, on and under the sea.
For BLUE, her sub-project “Ocean Acidification and Marine Worlds in the Antarctic Ocean” will be a multispecies ethnography that traces Ocean Acidification as the complex outcome of the interaction of anthropogenic histories with ecological/chemical/climatic dynamics. As a compound crisis of "natureculture", Ocean Acidification is one of our most influential yet hardly visible environmental issues. Decades of immense carbon absorption have slowly changed the biochemical makeup of the world's ocean. Its waters turn acid and leave vital organisms such as corals and plankton vulnerable to vanish under the pressure of their changing environment. Inspired by insights from the multispecies turn, the goal of this research is to learn to be methodologically and analytically attentive to both the human and more-than-human marine lifeworlds which are entangled within the phenomenon of OA.
During research trips to and around the Antarctic Ocean, Fine will combine anthropological methodology with natural science observation to bring OA into focus. Looking to the material interaction and sensory relationships formed between acid waters, zooplankton and embodied researchers, the aim is to make OA legible by putting practices of the humanities, arts and natural sciences into proximity.
Find out more about BLUE at www.blue.au.dk
Contact:
Fine Brendtner
Institut for Kultur og Samfund - Afdeling for Antropologi
Moesgård Allé 20
8270 Højbjerg