The Centre for Pandemics and One-health Research (P1H) aims to conduct a series of interviews, “P1H Coffee Break”, with researchers to raise understanding and awareness regarding the field of pandemics and One-health.
What is your academic background and research field?
If I go all the way back to my PhD, my PhD was actually in German literature. I guess it is quite original for this series of interviews. Then I turned that into a broader professorship in cultural history. For the last 10-15 years I have been a professor of cultural history.
What motivated you to do research on this topic?
It depends on what topic you mean. That is partly why I am here now as the head of the Centre for Global Sustainability. For the last 10 years or so, I have been doing research on the understandings and ideas of time. How we conceive of time in different ways, particularly the politics of time. That is the question of the climate crisis, emergency, the idea of the Anthropocene, and sustainability; these are the most important ways that we organise our temporal world. That is why I got interested in these questions of sustainability, which are now taking up all my time due to my new job as the leader of the new Centre for Global Sustainability.
Why do you think this topic is so important?
On one hand, it is kind of obvious that we live in an unsustainable world, which means that we cannot continue living like we do on this planet. We are using up all these resources, and we are killing all the species. We need to find other, more sustainable ways of living. This applies not only in the global north but also in the global south. To me, it seems like there is no other sort of question as important as that right now. With that said, of course, sustainability is another word for almost everything.
It is also a question of finding the most important parts of sustainability and the sustainability challenges that we should focus on and try to solve. And that is what we are doing in the new centre.
How are the studies of pandemics and One Health related to your field of research?
The pandemic works very easily as a marker of time, because when you think back to the pandemic, or specifically the COVID pandemic, which is what I mean when I say “pandemic”. It feels like an event that brought everything to a halt. At that point, I was even invited onto national news to talk about time, since everyone shared this strange sense that time had both stopped and sped up simultaneously.
During the pandemic we did shocking things like closing down air spaces and closing borders, things sped up both socially and politically. Still, we were stuck in our homes doing nothing. We might have done something, but at least all our appointments were cancelled. It was this very strong feeling of time not working.
This idea of how the COVID pandemic changed our perception of time, and this phenomenon continues to change our perception of time and space is extremely interesting to me. We did a blog on that in my research group, and we tried to follow different experiences of time and the pandemic.
I have done a lot of research on ideas of crisis, and the pandemic was a health crisis, a global health crisis. It was interesting when we started calling things a crisis. How does that change how we see it, how we operate, what we can do and so on. That is the pandemic thing.
One Health is extremely interesting to me right now because I am in the midst of establishing the Centre for Global Sustainability at the University of Oslo. Under the Centre of Global Sustainability are SUSTAINIT and the Centre for Pandemic and One-Health Research. One Health is a way of talking about sustainability; it is another word for thinking about those same connections between man, nature, and climate.
I am really interested in how that sort of concept and how that paradigm of One Health can help think about sustainability at the Centre.
You are now the leader of the Centre of Global Sustainability. What is the main focus of the centre?
The easy answer is sustainability, but the main focus of the Centre is to figure out how we reorganise knowledge at the University of Oslo to make it more useful and relevant to questions of sustainability. I think one of the problems of the University is that it has been so siloed into the disciplines. They have been organised and structured with little coordination. The work has been done inside the disciplines, inside the departments and inside the faculties.
Questions of sustainability, as with One-Health, do not operate within the borders of the disciplines. They are stretched across the disciplines all the time, therefore I think the main aim of the Centre is to figure out how we can reorganise knowledge to make it more relevant to useful questions and wicked problems of sustainability.
Have you gained some new perspectives since entering this leadership position?
Endless new perspectives! Most of them have to do with how the university is organised. How the university works, what you need to have at a university, all the different systems you need to know about, and all the different rules there are. I am fond of universities. I like them as institutions. I think they are cool, especially the sort of metropolitan European ones, the big ones with lots of people and lots of disciplines.
I learn a lot every day, and I have been getting to know all these new people whom I am now the boss of. They have all these wonderful projects and interesting projects that I am now starting to learn more about. My general learning curve right now is very steep and is partly why I wanted this job. I wanted to learn new things and work with new people.
How does the Centre actively work with the pandemic and One Health?
That is a good question, considering we are starting this centre now. We are organising the centre into thematic areas, and not into disciplines. One of our thematic areas is titled Health, Environment, and Climate. Bringing these dimensions together implicitly reflects a One-Health perspective, since it frames them in an integrated and organised way.
For many people, it is not immediately obvious that those things should be connected. What we are doing is creating an institution that gives real space for those kinds of questions. Of course, there is already the Centre for Pandemic and One-Health research, which will be central to our work and includes some of the key people driving that research. I am looking forward to learning how they approach it and how they carry it out. But since we only really began about a month ago, there are still a few things I need to sort out first.
Thank you to Helge for participating in this interview. Check out our Instagram at @pandemicscentre.uio to see snippets of the interview.