Nina Toudal Jessen - New postdoc at the Department of Anthropology
Nina Toudal Jessen joins the Filterscape project, where she will be working on the history of urban-rural connections through water.
My previous research has focused on planning, municipal decision-making, agricultural drainage schemes and land reclaims in Denmark from 1850s and onwards. In my dissertation Jord og Landskab (2021), I examined understandings of change and conservation in two sites in Western Zealand between 1850 and 1990s. Here, I showed how land use changes intersect with societal understandings of what count as desired, possible, and permissible.
I have just wrapped up my DFF Internationalisation project "Dry Lands, Wet Soils“which investigated the legacy of early 20th century soil improvement scheme on later agricultural policies and landscapes. In this project, I analysed the historically contingent ideational and material barriers to the current calls for wetting agricultural peat soils. A major interest of mine is thinking about how historical knowledge and historically oriented analyses can be applied in environmental policies and planning.
As part of the Filterscape project, I will be working on the history of urban-rural connections through water. Here, I will analyse the development of the seemingly clearcut distinction between urban and rural water politics. Therefore, for examining Danish riparian landscapes as partaking in filtering processes, I plant to do an intertwined examination of provincial urbanism and changes in peri-urban and rural water flows from the 1920s onwards. I hope to show how changes in understandings of water flows, contaminants and responsibilities followed from restructuring and reworking the water flows of provincial towns and their immediate hinterlands.
Conctact:
Nina Toudal Jessen
School of Culture and Society
Department of AnthropologyMoesgård Allé 20
Building 4215 - 218
8270 Højbjerg
ninatj@cas.au.dk