Professor Dolly Jørgensen
Environmental Humanities Fellow, May-June 2024
Home Institution: University of Stavanger
Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway specializing in histories of environment and technology. Her current research agenda focuses on cultural histories of animals, and her most recent monographs are The Medieval Pig(Boydell, 2024) and Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (MIT Press, 2019). She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and co-directs The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at University of Stavanger.
Project title: Reefs or Rubbish? A Comparative History of Rigs-to-Reef Policy
Abstract: I am writing an academic about the creation of artificial reefs from disused offshore oil structures, which is called rigs-to-reefs. In this work, I am positioning infrastructures as part of animal’s ecosystems and lifeworlds. Artificiality or naturalness in histories most often focus on the production of the item in question, i.e. when something originates from humans it is ‘artificial’. This discounts the infrastructure’s value or use as habitat. Habitat comes from the Latin habitare, meaning to inhabit or live. I argue that an exclusion of the artificial as habitat is misguided if we consider life from the nonhuman point of view. My project centres the animal use of these offshore infrastructures and how that use has been interpreted over time. My study compares the policy developments in the Gulf of Mexico, California Pacific coast, and North Sea in relation to rigs-to-reefs. My historical research considers a combination of science, politics, economics, and culture and how these work together to define what is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’; in turn, as ideas about the natural and artificial have crystallized, they have led to the formulation of and negotiations over policies.