Norwegian Research Council Ruin Memories Research Project

At-a-Glance

This four-year project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, comprised of nine full-time researchers, nine case-studies from Europe and North America with another four more part-time researchers, innovated how anthropologists study the modern world. The modern condition produces a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers, and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of histories. This ruin-condition of modernity was researched through this project. Based on selected case studies of industrial ruins, abandoned fishing villages, war remains and academic buildings in Norway, Russia, Iceland, Spain and the US, the project reconceived how the ruins of modernity are understood and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses.

Timeline

4 years

My Role

Principal Researcher

Methods

Ethnographic

Multi-media Documentary

Results

Innovated new research paradigm in anthropology and historical archaeology

1 book, 3 articles and chapters, 6 online publications

4 international workshops

1 exhibition website, 3 international exhibitions