ABSTRACT
In 2007 the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) was formed by nine scholars from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark with a shared concern over accelerating social-ecological change in the twenty-first century. I was one of the founders of the network and have served as its chair since 2008. Roughly two dozen international symposia, workshops, and research training courses organized over the past five years have brought approximately 150 new scholars of all experience levels to the network from throughout the Nordic region and beyond. The global change agenda has increasingly engaged the attentions and energies of NIES members, as stand-alone projects devoted to different aspects of environmental change have grown out of the network’s activities. Participating scholars in these initiatives come from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, the educational sciences, and increasingly the natural sciences. Such a mix of scholars engaging jointly in theoretical discussions, educational efforts and problem-driven, team-based research is one of the hallmarks that may distinguish NIES’s particular approach to integrated environmental humanities (IEH) from the methodological logics of kindred networks grounded in distinct discourses or scholarly disciplines such as ecocriticism, environmental history or environmental philosophy (cf. Hartman 2015). Above and beyond its core activities promoting integrated scholarly exchange and capacity building across the major scientific domains from arts and humanities through the social and natural sciences, NIES has initiated longer-term initiatives focused more specifically on environmental change. One of these, Project Bifrost, is a public humanities initiative focused on climate change action involving close collaboration of Environmental Humanities scholars and visual media artists. The second of these projects, Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM), is a larger integrated initiativeessentially a scholarly community of practice (cf. Wenger 1998)—that explores historical environmental change through cross-cutting, team-driven studies spanning multiple knowledge communities and scientific domains effectively organized (or even self-organizing) around questions difficult to address satisfactorily within the confines of single disciplines.
