Linus Rosén

My work is focused on power/resistance dynamics in processes of rural change, political repression and environment depletion, most recently in energy transitions. Working at the crossroads of critical geography, material anthropology and political ecology, I begin at the scale of the everyday and trace circuits of power to broader structures of governance, knowledge regimes, and colonialisms. 

My academic trajectory started with my doctoral research project (Rural Development, 2022) in which I explored how material enactments of state power – property grids, cement structures, fences, checkpoints and documents – become critical nodes in wider struggles over social survival and political freedom in rural Zambia. Presently I lead the project ‘Infrastructures of energy justice: enabling equitable energy transitions in an infrastructural world’ funded by Formas (Grant Number 2024-00413) which explores how low-carbon energy infrastructures catalyse new social, political and environmental struggles in rural Zambia. My research is further supported by my affiliation (senior research partner) at UiO: Energy and Environment Thematic Research Group Unruly Sustainability Challenges: addressing uncertainty in governing energy transitions (UNRULY SUSTAINABILITY) at the University of Oslo.

I approach my research with a commitment to understanding the socially uneven materialization of power and the politics animated by those who navigate contested landscapes. My ambition is to address not only repressive power, but also resistance, refusal and unruliness within repressive relations, laying bare the failures of oppressive power to suture the totality of social and ideological fields, and valorizing everyday forms of resistance as meaningful political action. I have a passion for ethnography and ‘thinking from the ground’ to create robust analytical frames for understanding colonial relations from the scale of the body (raced, sexed, placed) to the scale of the body politic (bordered, sedimented, fragmented). The task of productive criticism, I believe, is not only to acknowledge historical inequalities or to reject teleological assumptions – scripted outcomes or futures foretold – but also to commit to the politics of the possible in nurturing decolonial dialogues across sites of radical difference.

Within my capacity I am also privileged to teach a broad range of courses in Rural Development, including Social science theories for rural development (LU0072), Resource governance (LU0093) and Qualitative methods, data analysis and academic writing (LU0091) among several others, as well as mentoring and supervising BA, MA and PhD students in their thesis work.