Inge-Merete Hougaard
  • Øster Farimagsgade 5, Opgang E

    1353 København V

  • Source: Scopus
20182024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Short presentation

I study the everyday politics of rights to, access to and use of land and resources, including negotiations over nature and landscape values. With a background in Political Ecology, International Development Studies and Public Administration, my main research interests revolve around resource rights, climate politics, state-making and landscape change. 

Currently, I am working on a collaborative action research project, Storytelling Landscape Change, in which we explore the role of storytelling in the co-creation of landscapes in the context of multifunctional land consolidation in Denmark. The project is implemented in collaboration with three municipalities and the Danish Nature Agency, and we investigate how stories and narratives about the landscape and its history, as well as about citizens and public authorities, emerge in negotiations about the landscape and landscape values. Likewise, we explore how storytelling can create new landscapes, and through what we call 'more-than-human landscape co-creation' we explore what role non-human actors/agents have in this process. I am particularly interested in exploring conceptualisations of nature, and how questions about the right to access and use of land and resources emerge in the co-creation process between landowners, other citizens and public institutions.

Previously, I have worked on resource rights, ethnic recognition and collective territories in the context of sand extraction in Colombia, as well as carbon dioxide removal through biochar and carbon capture and storage (CCS), and what role the promise of negative emissions play in Danish climate policy.

Theoretically, I am primarily inspired by political ecology and science and technology studies (STS), while I methodologically use ethnographic methods, participant observations, household surveys and interviews, as well as audio-visual methods.

 

Knowledge of languages

Danish

English

Spanish

External positions

Postdoctoral Fellow, Lund University

1 Jul 202031 Mar 2023

Keywords

  • Faculty of Social Sciences
  • Political ecology
  • resource rights
  • state-making
  • landscape change
  • agriculture
  • politics of recognition
  • collective territories
  • precarity
  • climate politics
  • negative emissions
  • carbon dioxide removal
  • Storytelling
  • moral ecology
  • Biochar
  • land concentration

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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