Isabelle Hugøy

My PhD project Decarbonising Knowledge? Towards Carbon Neutral Agriculture in Norway and Costa Rica investigates ways of knowing in times of altering ecologies. It does so by taking a comparative approach to explore processes of transformation within the agricultural sectors in Norway and Costa Rica. Both countries aspire to decarbonize agriculture (i.e., make carbon neutral) and they currently promote soils' potential for carbon sequestration and storage. By focusing on human-soil relations, my project asks; how do humans relate to soils and other more-than-human beings in times of social, environmental and economic instabilities? What implications do efforts to decarbonize agriculture have for the knowledges that go into doing and managing agriculture in Norway and Costa Rica? And how is soil actualized across different knowledge registers in this aspired transition?

The project is inspired by, and a further development of, my MA project. The latter explored the relationship between visualism, practice, and knowledge in context of ecological alteration, through the specific case of the coffee leaf rust disease.