Swedish Human Ecology, Political Ecology, and the Struggle for Interdisciplinarity: Bridging the Socio-Natural Divide in Research and Education

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research and education on human-environment relations has a natural place in many Anglo-American geography and anthropology departments. In Sweden, however, critical scholarship across the socio-natural divide has largely been outsourced to the interdisciplinary field of human ecology. Since the 1970s, Swedish human ecologists have sought to integrate perspectives from the social and natural sciences, giving rise to challenging questions associated with interdisciplinary research. In this article, three ‘generations’ of Swedish human ecologists reflect on the development of Swedish human ecology as an interdisciplinary research field, intimately related to geography and anthropology, through its institutionalization at the universities of Lund and Gothenburg. Focusing on a radical tradition of Swedish human ecology, the field is situated in relation to political ecology to broaden the Anglo-American origin stories that pattern this cognate interdisciplinary field.