Louisa is a doctoral researcher at MESH at the University of Cologne. Her work is concerned with domestication and land use in the Nordic Arctic, focusing on colonial and indigenous land relations and shifting political ontologies. Her current project will address previous and current draining, tilling, grazing, burning and foraging in these landscapes. The presence of these practices in some areas and their absences in others, are relevant for contemporary concerns about biodiversity loss, woody plant encroachment and peatland conservation. In addition to ethnographic methods, fieldwork will include working with landscapes as archives (Ogden 2021, Mathews 2022) and engaging STS methods for document analysis (Asdal & Reinertsen 2022).
Before coming to Cologne, Louisa studied at the University of Oslo, where she did an MPhil in Social Anthropology and an honours certificate at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. Her master’s thesis Making Sheep, Making Landscapes focuses on Shetland crofters’ attempts to maintain their grass fields and heather hills under the compound pressures of unpredictable weather patterns, migrating geese, fluctuating market prices, past and present agricultural policies, and public opinions on sheep farming. This work with sheep in Shetland involves practices of domestication that both exercise control over and rely on the autonomy of non-human actors, making it a site for re-conceptualising relations of domestication.
Contact: l.crysmann[at]uni-koeln.de
Office: Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24, 3. Stock, 3.06
Talks and Conferences
Crysmann, Louisa. 2024. ‘Putting Sheep to the Hill in Shetland: Reading the Relations between Sheep and Landscapes beyond Narratives of Destruction’. In CP449 Thinking with sheep to understand landscape transformations, convened by Annika Cápelan. 4S-EASST Amsterdam 2024: Making and doing Transformations, Amsterdam, July 18 2024.
Crysmann, Louisa. 2023. ‘Tracing sheep through their ears: The co-use of traditional ear marks and electronic tags in a Shetland common grazing area’. In Panel 3: Inscribing Nature in Digital Worlds, convened by Marianne Lien & Tom Bratrud. Everyday Life in Digitalized Worlds, Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Oslo, October 26 2023.