University of Gothenburg
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Marie Widengård

Researcher

School of Global
Studies
Mail
marie.widengard@globalstudies.gu.se
Visiting address
Konstepidemins väg 2
41314 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 700
40530 Göteborg

About Marie Widengård

I am currently involved in three projects. Two projects focus on Swedish visions of fossil-free fuels, specifically how a fair transition to liquid biofuels can be achieved, in Sweden and transnationally. The first examines 'Just Biofuels' and the second specifically explores the Forest-based Bioeconomy. The third project is concerned about Borderline Justice: Between Extraction and Conservation in Cockpit Country, Jamaica.

2022 talks:

AAG January 31: on 'Classification fix, or how to b/order biofuels to switch between crises'

AAG February 25: on Forests as recarbonization? Problematizing pathways toward net-zero carbon as an ethical fix

DOPE March 26: on 'Classification fix, or how to b/order biofuels to switch between crises'

IFPM4 April 27-29: on ''When is the forest mitigating climate change: from polarised times to mediating the right time in Swedish press'

POLLEN June 28-July 1: on 'Borderline Justice: Between Extraction and Conservation'

CES June 29-July 1: on 'Self-image and International Environmental Reputation within the European Union: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

NESS June 7-9: on 'Developing principles for a just and caring transformation: ‘justice-and-care-to come’ in the Swedish forest-based bioeconomy'

Other work in progress:

Atlas Without Borders, a live workspace which is currently offline but will be updated as the projects run into border issues.

The past

I have been responsible for the Human Ecology education and was teaching various ‘green’ themes, such as natural resources, environmental politics and movements, sustainable development, sustainability standardization and certification, gender and ecofeminism, and more broadly, environmental social science theories and methods and research design.

My PhD work focused on the theme of biofuels, and I examined some of the processes, discourses, materialities, technologies, and relationships involved in the production of biofuel crop Jatropha curcas L. I approached production as an assembling of components that are both material and social, and I looked at the work needed to maintain and/or dismantle biofuel resources. Taking an ethnographic and multi-sited approach, I approached biofuels as a project in-the-making, in, and across, various sites, including Zambia, sub-Saharan Africa, the European Union, and worldwide. I took use of biofuels’ novelty and ‘becomingness’ to render strange more familiar notions, to generate an analytics of how political ecologies and political economies are becoming, and to provide deeper insights into what resources, sustainability, poverty, land, and nation-states actually are. This approach suggested that the production of biofuels is complex and ‘messy’, and that outcomes for societies and ecologies are of an uncertain and ambiguous nature.

Previous to my PhD work, I worked four years in non-governmental organisations in sub-Saharan Africa. My university studies include law, environmental and water engineering, participatory research, and rural development. My master theses investigated the theme of participatory plant breeding and intellectual property rights of plants and genes, with field work in Nicaragua. I have consulted in sustainability standard development and certification application (ISO and RSB), and conducted evaluations and scientific literature reviews.