Ögmundardottir, Helga | Iceland

Ögmundardottir, Helga | Iceland

Helga is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her postdoc work is a part of the Nordic centre of excellence research project called NordStar. She did her undergraduate studies in social anthropology and philosophy at Stockholm University, her MA in social anthropology at the University of Iceland and her PhD in cultural anthropology at Uppsala University. Her MA research focused on the interaction between indigenous peoples and Icelandic immigrants in Canada and the US in the 19th century, and her PhD research focused on traditional research use and hydropower development in the Icelandic highland. She has been involved in many research projects dealing with various issues, such as fisheries and fishing communities in Iceland and the North-Atlantic region, energy management and its historical development in Iceland, erosion in Iceland, invasive species and people’s perception of these in Iceland, adoption and views of hybrid cars and alternative fuels, and policies on and people’s perception of energy and climate change in the Nordic countries.  She has taught various courses on environmental issues, resource use, climate change and human-nature interaction on university level in various institutions in Iceland since 2004, as well as supervised several BA/BS and MA/MA students in anthropology and natural and resource management in their thesis research.


 

Project at IAS-STS: Local strategies to enhance adaptive capacities: dynamics of transitions towards adaptive and carbon-neutral communities.

The project will analyse community dynamics and the dynamics of strategic planning in four Nordic communities that successfully have adapted towards more sustainable living, and translate community institutional structures, preconditions and transformation processes into dynamic computer models, rooted in system dynamics modelling, enabling the simulation of region-wide implications of different settings, policies and strategies at the community level. Two tasks will be conducted: 1. Identify institutional arrangements and governance structures that promote energy transitions, with a focus on framing conditions as well as institutional preconditions for possible local-level transitions of the energy system. A central question is: How far do preconditions to implement energy transitions differ between the Nordic states, given that they provide distinct ambitions and trajectories of policy designs directed to the energy sector in the past? 2. Identify and analyse, through in-depth semi-structured interviews, the four regional examples of energy transition processes, with a focus on processes at the municipal level. The question here is: To what extent do efforts in transition enactment depend on different local and regional institutional settings, actors and their strategies? This requires a focus on the actor level to identify the processes by which municipalities translate national energy visions into concrete local action, or by which they design their own strategies if national support in providing guiding visions is low. In addition to governmental and sectoral actors, emphasis is given to the role of NGOs and civil society associations, which are also expected to play an important role.


 

Selected Publications

Thórhallsdóttir, Anna Gudrún, Árni Daníel Júlíusson and Helga Ögmundardóttir.  2013.  The Sheep, the Market, and the Soil: Environmental Destruction in the Icelandic Highlands, 1880-1910.  In Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments. Ed. by Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Ögmundardóttir, Helga. 2011. The Shepherds of Þjórsárver. Traditional Use and Hydropower Development in the Commons of the Icelandic Highland. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology no. 49. Uppsala University, Sweden.

Hamilton, L.C., O. Ottestad, and H. Ögmundardóttir. 2006. Rise and fall of the herring towns: Impacts of climate change and human teleconnections. In Climate change and the economics of the world’s fisheries.  Ed. by R. Hannesson, M. Barange, and S.F. Herrick Jr. Northampton MA: Edward Elgar.  

Hamilton, L.C., S. Jónsson, H. Ögmundardóttir, and I.M. Belkin. 2004. Sea changes ashore: The ocean and Iceland’s herring capital. Arctic 57(4): 325-335.