Emplacing sustainability

Elizabeth Sanna Barron

Geographers understand the term place to be short-hand for a diverse set of perspectives and practices. Place is space made real and thick with description, history, and experience. It can incorporate fixed and fluid ideas about the physicality of landscapes, the political negotiations of boundaries, ideas about identity, and attachments to each other and nature. How can we use the richness of the concept of place to reframe sustainability - how we understand it for ourselves, how we work on it as scholars, and how we communicate it to the public? This is the topic of Emplaced Sustainability, Dr. Barron’s current book project, which she will present at the upcoming lecture.

Elizabeth Barron is professor of environmental geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in Trondheim, Norway and is trained as an interdisciplinary scholar with degrees in conservation biology, anthropology, forest ecology and geography. Her research interests center around the ontological politics of biodiversity conservation and place-based sustainability, with a special interest in how knowledge developed and stewarded in different communities can come together to co-create sustainable relationships and flourishing places - and idea she calls emplacement. She also continues her work on the sustainable use of wild fungi, and chairs of the Fungal Use Group at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This work extends to envisioning how fungal biology and ecology can contribute to re-thinking conversation politics and practice. Before moving to Norway and starting her current position at NTNU, she was an assistant and then associate professor at UW Oshkosh and the first associate director of the Sustainability Institute for Regional Transformations. During academic year 2025-2026 she is on sabbatical to write a book on emplacement, under contract with Nature Springer Press.