Featured Research
Researcher and PhD candidate Cecilie Hirsch examines the challenges of implementing the international climate change mitigation initiative REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) in the Bolivian context, and focuses on the role of civil society and social movements in the shaping of environmental policy.
Audun Solli is doctoral candidate at the Interfaculty research area Cultural Transformations in the Age of Globalization (Kultrans) at the University of Oslo. His research analyzes Mexican and Venezuelan cinema to answer questions about the nature of modern states and how they are best conceptualized.
After completing 8,000 interviews in 21 countries, a unique project on attitudes towards Latin-American Spanish and how they form the linguistic identity of its speakers, is coming to an end.
Article in Norwegian (pages 40-41) from the magazine Hubro.
Many scientists and students from both Brazil and Norway have been involved in the project "BERRYSYS - A systems approach to biological control in organic and integrated strawberry production".
Researcher Anna Birgitte Milford has examined why some coffee farmers are still unwilling to join co-operatives which can provide them the Fairtrade label.
Torbjørn Haugaasen has been leading a project investigating the ecology of the Brazil nut tree.The tree produces one of the most socio-economically important non-timber forest products in Amazonia – the Brazil nut (paranøtter).
What would Brazilian workers and trade unions gain from a social clause – a linkage between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that would condition a country's trading rights on its compliance with core labour standards, including freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining?
What happens to old economic elite groups when economic liberalization removes old privileges and economic globalization requires outward orientation and competition for home markets? And what are the implications of their strategies to confront these new challenges for the sustainable development of their home countries?
A multidisciplinary research project called “Desired immigrants - Frustrated Adventurers? Norwegians in Latin America, 1820 – 1940” (NiLA) was initiated in 2008 involving researchers in Norway and Latin America. Central to the project is the development of a database that will provide information about almost every Norwegian who traveled to Latin America during that period.
A research project has recently been started at the Section for International Studies at the Norwegian Institute of Urban and Regional Research (NIBR) named “How formalization closed the gender land gap in Peru and the impact on women’s empowerment”. The project analyses gender relations and land ownership from an economic perspective, applying flexible methodologies of investigation.
Bjørn Ola Tafjord, Associate Professor at the Department of History and Religious Studies of the University of Tromsø, is studying dynamics of and interactions between religions and indigenous traditions in Talamanca, the south-eastern region of Costa Rica.
Latin America is experiencing an increasing call for more domestic controls of national resources and growing claims for a redistribution of the nations’ oil wealth from civil society. With increased revenues from oil and gas and new policy regimes in Bolivia and Venezuela, programmes for social and economic development have been publicized. “Flammable Societies” is an international research project that explores the organisation and outcome of these programmes, their potentials in reducing poverty and the conflicting interests between differing ethnic groups and classes.
In her PhD research project anthropologist Margit Ystanes explores the conditions under which a concession holding community of loggers and chicleros (men extracting chewing gum base from the forest for export purposes) in Guatemala enters into collaboration with representatives of national and foreign ‘developers’ of tourism. Ystanes suggests that people’s concept of trust should stand centrally in a comprehension of why the cooperation forum does not appear to fulfil all its proclaimed intentions.
Does original literature really exist? And if not, what is actually plagiarism? These are among the issues that Wladimir Chavez deals with in his PhD research. From his desk in Halden, the young Ecuadorian researcher is stepping in to a literary minefield as he revises former evaluations and accusations of plagiarism among some of the history’s greatest Hispanic writers and poets. Chávez has developed his own methodology of text comparison, in order to clarify inconsistencies in use of literary terminology related to plagiarism, among colleagues.
A large collaborative research project aimed at improving the forage value of degraded pastures in Central America is now coming to an end. But the research continues, due to the project’s interesting findings and methodology.
With the appointment of Carlos Cabanillas as Associate Professor, the establishment of Spanish studies and the introduction of a new research project on cultural transfers in Latin American literature, the University of Tromsø is emerging as a new hub for research on Latin American culture and literature in Norway.
Ole Kristian Våge started on his PhD research project Harvesting the blue field: Norwegian and Spanish terminology in aquaculture within the discipline of Terminology approximately 2 years ago. Next to some teaching at the NHH, he is still working on his monograph, which in itself seems quite interdisciplinary, as may easily be associated with problem approaches from the social sciences.
Himself both a researcher and a screenwriter, José Andrés Fonseca Hidalgo at the University of Bergen has just finished his doctoral thesis on narrative tendencies in Latin American films, with samples from Colombia and his homeland Costa Rica.
As a part of the extensive international research project Flammable Societies, the social anthropologist Iselin Åsedotter Strønen is doing field work for her doctoral thesis in low income urban areas, called barrios, in Venezuela.
Elin Cecilie Ranum's research on youth gangs, the socalled "maras", in Central America shows that the way the state apparatus has handled the gang problem has led to an increase in violence and negative consequences for the trust in state institutions and support for democracy.
In his PhD research Håvard Haarstad shows that not even Evo Morales has been able to counter the negative effect of global economic forces on the influence of labor unions.
By supporting the work of building competence at the local level, the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute contributes to reducing the degree of damage caused by landslides in Central America.
In his doctoral thesis in anthropology, Christian Sørhaug explains why the swamp dwelling Warao Indians pick up a bicycle at a large city garbage dump and use the funds from Chavez' missions to buy DVD players.
About one million children die every year because of indoor pollution due to open fires are used for cooking and heating. A recently completed PhD study by Esperanza Diaz, UiB, shows that improved stoves with ventilation and chimneys could save many lives.
Mònica Guillén-Royo is currently finishing the paper Adequacy of life domains and relative consumption in Peru. The article is the culmination of five years of research on consumption and wellbeing in this Latin-American country. The study discusses the relationship between the consumption of the reference group (the group whom people compare themselves with) and people's wellbeing in seven poor Peruvian communities. It shows, in opposition to what is usually expected, that what others consume might have a greater impact on people's wellbeing than their own consumption levels.