Johanne Bruun, BSc, MSc, PhD

Post-Doctoral Research Associate 4

Worked on Case Study 4: ‘Nordaustlandet and the “Invention” of Ecology’

 

Johanne’s work brings together historical and political geography, focusing on the intersection between scientific practice, material politics, spatialised governance and questions of terrain and territory in the Arctic.

 

Johanne’s PhD (2018) at the Department of Geography at Durham University concentrated on Danish and US field expeditions in Greenland during the 1950s and examined the use of science as a means of incorporating Greenlandic landscapes into the realm of ‘Western’ modernity and how this colonial ordering of nature led to the formation of territorial power structures. The driving force behind her research is an interest in the role of science in how the Arctic is framed and understood as a political space. Significantly, this work is both rooted in core debates in geography – in particular theories of territory, sovereignty, colonial knowledge production, and the geographic practices of science – and in interdisciplinary debates as it engages perspectives from history, international relations, anthropology, the earth sciences, and Science and Technology Studies. Johanne has published in Geography Compass, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing, and Polar Geography.

 

Following the completion of her work on the project in August 2022, Johanne took up an Assistant Professorship in Environmental Human Geography at the University of Birmingham.