What? When Tywin Lannister explains to Arya Stark what legacy means, namely that which remains of you after you are dead, it suggests a notion of post-mortem life. When we gather and remember someone who passed away or when we sense the presence of past lives in haunted places, it suggests that something, whatever it is, lives on. The same idea is present in the current debate on climate change. What do we leave behind in the rocks for future generations to find? In order to answer that, we need to ask: What does it take for something to live on? How can objects receive the distributed identities of others and store them even after the donor itself has passed? This project is an investigation into this very question. Why? The project provides a conceptual framework for thinking post-mortem life. Both the Anglo-Saxon and Continental tradition makes a strong case for mortality as the very constitution of being human in contrast to the idea of the immortal soul. The steam of latter idea seems to have burned out in our secular age. But there is a scale in-between the two which is important to explore. We need a fully fledged theory of different object's capacity to receive and preserve a fragment of another object's distributed identity (what I with a term borrowed from J.K. Rowling calls "horcruxes"), if we want to make sense of our impact on the Earth system on a long timescale. The project sheds new light on identity, death and the relation between objects, humans and non-humans alike. How? The project will be carried out at the University of Stavanger in close collaboration with professor Dolly Jørgensen. As a visiting scholar with the Greenhouse environmental humanities research group of the University of Stavanger, I will be surrounded by an interdisciplinary group of environmental humanities scholars who will support me with the project. I will have access to the Greenhouse Library, one of the few dedicated environmental humanities library collections globally. I will also draw on my year-long association with colleagues at Aarhus University and participate in activities organised by the local research groups when relevant. In this sense, I will be able to establish a network of peers for development of the current project and future ones across disciplines.

GAPSLE is an interdisciplinary project studying criminal justice system (CJS) in Norway. It recognises the need to go beyond individual skill-based learning and promotes development of collaborative learning as a way to find new innovative ways of working, increase staff’s work-based well-being and reduce reoffending rates in prisons. The underlaying rationale is contributing to making the EU a more secure society. The approach is to (1) empirically explore the current state of collaborative learning activities nationally by interviewing professionals across CJS and analysing documents, (2) empirically explore tensions around collaborative learning by interviewing professionals across CJS, (3) conduct a survey and develop an assessment tool to chart CJS practitioners’ readiness for collaborative learning and (4) develop a strategy to support collaborative organizational learning activities among different occupational groups and creation of social innovations within CJS. Cultural-historical activity theory and expansive learning give the theoretical framework for the study. Their strength is to allow going beyond individuals and to take into account larger contextual and systemic activity (e.g. organizational structures, rules, community) when analysing learning and activity. Methodologically they provide with established methods to analyse need state (readiness) and tensions within an activity. The expected outcomes will be exploited by practitioners, educators and decisionmakers within CJS to support in reviewing and designing learning events and strategies, and academics in the field of workplace learning to develop methodologies. Furthermore, they are expected to raise interest among layperson who have interest towards prison work, prison services and issues contributing to a safer society.

The planetary scale of environmental and climatic complexities, and the anxieties of global crises prompted by threats introduced by the spectre of the Anthropocene have brought scalar imagination at the forefront of historical writings. One of the well-known ironies of the climate crisis is the fact that, despite its planetary and temporal scale, its effects manifest themselves in everyday experiences of seasons and weather. Weathering Colonial Calcutta introduces nuances of material, cultural and political systems into historical examinations of how communities and social groups understood, coordinated and responded to climate and the weather. It presents an urban, material and cultural history of colonial Calcutta as a story of changing ideas about, and everyday experiences of the weather. It aims to reframe histories of Calcutta by examining the place of the weather, seasons and climate in cultural and political expressions, public and domestic spaces, and material culture. The research takes two distinct yet interrelated approaches to writing a history of the social construction of “weather”. The first theme examines the shifts in knowledge of Calcutta’s “weather” (noun) through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this sense, the research offers critical insights into the insistence with which Calcutta’s weather, seasons, and climate forced themselves on scientific and social viewpoints, and modes of cultural activity. Second, the project traces the concept of “weather” as a transitive verb — “to pass through and survive” — and explores the braiding of daily lives and “weathering” practices as embedded in the creation and maintenance of racial, class and social thinking and practices. Overall, the project takes the evocative history of the weather into politics, culture and society, revealing its importance to key themes from science, literature, art, architecture, urban planning, and technologies to race, religion, environment, gender and culture.

Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in industry such as ocean engineering, biomedicine, aerospace and a driven idea for hydrokinetic energy conversion. Strong nonlinear interactions between flow and structures, as well as turbulent flow bring a huge challenge for understanding and dynamics prediction of the FSI systems. Facing with this challenge and the rising motivation of harnessing clean energy from natural fluids, SMARTFLUIDS aims to build a framework of developing Reduced Order Models (ROMs) with low complexity but retaining dominant physics for FSI, which will bring a deep understanding and efficient prediction of FSI. A low-dimensional subspace of the FSI will be extracted using modal analysis through Variational Autoencoders (VAE) based on deep learning (DL) of FSI data. The FSI data will be obtained by performing high-fidelity computational fluids dynamics (CFD) simulations of classic FSI problems. The ROMs are developed by both physics-informed mapping of governing equations onto the low-dimensional subspace and data-driven techniques to deal with nonlinear and unresolved parts of the FSI. Physical constrains are incorporated and sparse measurements of the FSI will be used in building the ROMs. Dynamics and future states of the FSI, hydro- or aerodynamic loads on the structures and structural responses can be predicted based on the ROMs. SMARTFLUIDS will provide an innovative and systematic view of FSI by focusing on a few dominant features and enrich the knowledge of FSI physics by adopting latest DL techniques. The project will bring a novel solution to reduce time and cost of CFD and experiments in predicting FSI dynamics and structural responses for engineering design of pipelines, cables, wind turbines blades, airplane wings and promote the renewable energy development.

Due to rapid global development of offshore wind, challenges of ensuring high efficiency in operations and maintenance (O&M) for offshore wind turbines become prominent in reducing the levelized cost of energy. Trimaran vessels, known for their high-performance characteristics including exceptional speed, seakeeping and spacious deck areas, give advantages in performing the O&M activities effectively. Current research on the hydrodynamic performance of the trimarans primarily focuses on conventional applications without considering their practical utility related to offshore wind O&M activities. When the trimarans approaching the wind turbine substructures, unique hydrodynamic characteristics of the vessels needs to be understood to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the maintenance operations. To date, for offshore wind O&M applications, there is no existing detailed hydrodynamic study concerning the optimization of the outrigger layout for the trimarans. Thus, a computationally efficient hydrodynamic optimization method based on Harmonic Polynomial Cell (HPC) method will be developed in this project. The developed method will then be validated against Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations. By utilizing Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) as a multi-objective optimization algorithm in conjunction with Back Propagation (BP) Neural Network, an outrigger layout optimization method will be tailored for the trimaran O&M vessels under different operational conditions. During the fellowship, I will employ interdisciplinary approaches for my studies, such as the applications of the HPC method in calculating multi-body hydrodynamic problems, CFD simulations in validating the developed solver and the BP neural network method in improving the multi-objective optimization efficiency. This will effectively improve my research capability and facilitate the developed optimization solver for the applications in offshore wind O&M activities.