Christina Fredengren

I work in the meetings points of heritage studies, archaeology, curatorship, gender theory and the environmental humanities. Of particular interest are questions about deep time, materiality, climate, more-than-human, ethics, sacrifice, human-animal relations, naturecultures, sustainability, intragenerational justice and care.

Networks and affiliations

* Founder of Stockholm University Environmental Humanities Network together with Claudia Egerer and Karin Dirke.

*Scientific Leader of Deep time and Member of the Seed Box, an environmental humanities collaboratory at Linköping University, funded by Formas and Mistra

*Affiliated Researcher at the Posthumanities Hub at Tema Gender, LiU

*Member of Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network

* Gexcel scholar

*Participates in COST Action on New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How Matter Comes to Matter' http://newmaterialism.eu/

*Bogbody network

Projects

Curating Time (Formas-Mistra 2020-)

Curating time explores time and temporality in curatorial and environmental strategies. With a base in critical feminist posthumanism this project further problematizes the anthropocentric focus in many heritage policies and strategies (Fredengren 2015) and probes into the technocratic politicization of the long-term. Here, it focuses on the use of heritage in sustainable development (also critiqued in Alaimo 2012 and problematized in Fredengren 2012) as it deals with range of naturalized others as if they have no agency and leaves the stage open for appropriation and exploitation. Furthermore, such policies often underarticulates the notion of intra-generational ethics and care and promotes chrono-linear time keeping. Not only do such policies risk downplaying materiality, but also a number of human and non-human others, driving wedges between nature and culture, it also risks transplanting, such binaries into museum collections, curatorship and exhibition-making. Whereas critical heritage studies (Smith 2006, 2016) has pointed out many injustices of who gets under-represented in the heritage repertoire, this project will not stop at critiquing the powers involved in heritage-editing, but explore and intervene in material and temporal trajectories and agencies in emerging museum ecologies (hereby extending reasoning on media ecologies (cf Hörl 2018) onto museums/exhibitions/curatorship).

Recent publications:

Fredengren, C. 2021 (in press). Djuptidsverktyg, hållbarhet och omsorg mellan generationer. I Nordbäck, C. (ed). Ekokritik och Museipedagogik I skuggan av Antropocen. Göteborg: Världskulturmuseerna Göteborg.

Fredengren, C. & Karlsson, J. 2019. Mossberga Mosse: Excavating the Archives and Tracing Museum Ecologies. Journal of Wetland Archaeology, 19:1-2, 115-130.6.

Fredengren, Christina. 2018. Re-wilding the Environmental Humanities. A Deep Time Comment. Current Swedish Archaeology, Vol. 26, Pp. 50-60.

Checking in with Deep Time (Formas 2017-2021)
This project run in collaboration with Prof Cecilia Åsberg aims to deal with the major research question of how to better re-tie the material and immaterial knots between past, present and future generations, and to suggest ways forward for moving towards innovative ways of checking in with our post-natural and materializing clocks. The project is methodologically innovative and aspires to have high impact on the approaches to sustainability, intergenerational justice and care in postnatural heritage management. It works with three studies - on focusing on the politicization of the long-term within the natural/cultural heritage sectors, the next with how vernacular temporalities are met and transformed on site at Gärstadsverken (a garbage disposal site situated on an Iron Age sanctuary) and theoretical work on intergenerational justice and care. Here traditional theories are compared to those developed within critical posthumanism and the environmental humanities. This project has an emphasis on citizens humanities and collaborative research. It also aims to provide humanities innovations to the civil services.

Recent publications:

Fredengren, C. 2021. Heritage as phenomenon and worlding practices. In Petursdottir, T. & Bangstad, T. (eds) Heritage Ecologies. London: Routledge.

Fredengren, C. & Åsberg, C. 2020. Checking in with Deep Time. In Harrison, R. & Sterling, C. (eds) Deterritorializing the Future:Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press.

Kluiving, S., Liden, K. & Fredengren, C. (eds) 2021. Environmental Humanities: A rethinking of landscape archaeology? Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Tidens Vatten (Vetenskapsrådet, Berit Wallenberg, Vitterhetsakademin, Gad Rausing 2013-)
The project provides an overview of the depositions of human- and animal bones from waters and wetlands in Sweden. The aim is to give a better understanding och what effects these depositions may have had in society during Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. Main questions are who got deposited? What human-animal relations were changed through these deposition and what power relationships were negotiated? The project works with critical post-human theory to discuss the mattering of bodies and the collaboration with archaeological sciences (as osteology, isotope-analysis and DNA). This project has been published in several papers and the research is currently synthesized in a monograph with the working title: Sacrifice – the nature of the in-humane. The project continues, for example with the research at Lake Bokaren.

Recent publications:

Fredengren, C. 2019. Finitude – Human and Animal Sacrifice in a Norse setting. Proceedings of the Old Norse Mythology Conference 2015. Stockholm. Stockholm University Press.

Fredengren, Christina. 2018. Personhood of Water. Depositions of Bodies and Things in Water Contexts as a Way of Observing Agential Relationships. Current Swedish Archaeology, Vol. 26, Pp. 219-245.

Fredengren, C. 2017. Becoming Bog Bodies. Sacrifice and politics of exclusion, as evidenced in the deposition of skeletal remains in wetlands near Uppåkra. Journal of Wetland Archaeology 17.

Fredengren, C. 2016. Deep time enchantment. Bog bodies, crannogs and other worldly sites at disjuncture’s in time. Archaeology and Environmental Ethics. World Archaeology 48:4.

Fredengren, C., & Löfqvist, C. 2015 a. Food for Thor. The deposition of human and animal remains in a Swedish wetland area. Journal of Wetland Archaeology 15.

Fredengren, C., 2015 c. Water politics. Wetland deposition of human and animal remains in Uppland, Sweden. Fornvännen 111. Stockholm.

Bokaren project (in development with Susanna Eklund)
The site as Bokaren, Co. Uppland is a presumed lake-platform with finds of human- and animal remains, particularly horses. The finds were made in 1939 and collected by Professor Rutger Sernander and Nils Sundquist, the county archaeologist. The area was investigated in 1941 by Dr Bengt Lundholm. Since then, both finds and documentation were dispersed and the site was never fully published. A new effort to gather the material and to start an investigation of the site was made by Tidens Vatten that teamed up with Andreas Hennius and Susanna Eklund in a new joint project. The available osteological material was analyzed by Tidens Vatten and some of the material was radiocarbondated (see also Fredengren 2015), also a trial excavation was carried out in 2015 where a human skeleton and several horse bones were found together with worked wood, that could be a part of a platform. This project is under development and research-funding is searched for

Earlier projects (examples)
The Values of Heritage
The Crannog Research Programme
The Lake Settlement Project