Lone Ree Milkær. Forestillinger om et bæredygtigt liv : Praksis, skalering og meningsdannelse i hverdagslivets klimaaktivisme i Bærekraftige liv Landås

Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion – AHKR, The University of Bergen

Abstract:

This thesis answers the research questions of how the abstract concepts of climate change and sustainability are made meaningful in an everyday life perspective. It is part of the field of cultural science climate research. By closely studying the movement Sustainable Life in Landås in Bergen from a cultural analytical perspective, the thesis answers what notions of how a sustainable life can be created through the movement’s narratives and practices. Based on empirical analyses of written sources, both historical and contemporary and interview and observation material, the thesis uses the classic categories of time, place and social environment as the framework of the analysis.

The practice of sustainable living is seen as an example of how the global phenomena of sustainability and climate change are anchored in places locally and in notions of the future. The analysis shows how Bærekraftige liv Landås use notions of connection to the past to create a sense of chronological connectedness in the present to both the past and the future through experiential concepts of time: tradition, nostalgia, generation and cultural heritage. By connecting global climate change to the concept of local sustainability, the movement is anchoring the meanings, understandings and activities in local neighbourhoods, which, e.g. can be seen in the designation ’Landås’ as part of the movement’s name. In this localisation, Bærekraftige liv Landås creates a sustainable neighbourhood that can function as a framework for downscaling global climate change to local sustainability. Scaling as a practice in itself creates the possibility to move between points or to be at several possible points on a scale at the same time, which also applies to the creation of meaning. Several things can make sense at the same time. In the use of scale as an analytical perspective, movement, connections, and transformations become part of the creation of meaning, which connects past, present and future and the global and the local in the understanding of climate change and sustainability in Sustainable Life Landås’s practice.

The results of the analysis are conveyed in the dissertation’s three articles, which examine aspects of meaning-making. In the first article, ’The great re-skilling. The understanding of generation, tradition, and nostalgia in everyday-life climate activism’ shows the movement’s self-understanding and self-presentation through various written material with a focus on experiential time concepts such as generation, tradition and nostalgia. In the second article, ’The cultural heirs at Lystgården. How constructions of cultural heritage and sustainability intertwine and become a political platform for an everyday climate activist movement in Bergen’, the connection between cultural heritage and sustainability is analysed using Sustainable Life’s headquarters in composer Edvard Grieg’s old family summer home as an example. In the dissertation’s third and final article, ’The cultural heirs at Lystgården. How constructions of cultural heritage and sustainability intertwine and become a political platform for an everyday climate activist movement in Bergen’, I examine how the role of cultural heritage is used to legitimise everyday climate activism.

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