Atte Arffman

I am a PhD candidate of History at the Department of History and Ethnology. My main research field is environmental history but my research also touch on political-, economic, and intellectual history of the United States as well as newspaper history. I am also interested in questions of human and non-human collective agency and nature-culture-dichotomy.

In my PhD thesis (Americans and the Politics of Nature: Mechanisms of Politicization of Natural Phenomena in the United States) I study the effects of natural phenomena to environmental- and economic political decision-making. As a case example I use U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which I study as a part of larger entaglement of human societies and the environment, and not solely as disasters.

The central task of environmental history is to identify different structures and ways of action that has guided environmental and economic activities to unsustainable directions in the past. Additionally, environmental historians pursue to bring forward the complex and often unexpected effects of natural phenomena to the political decision making. The goal of my PhD thesis is to offer critical viewpoints to why market-determined environmental politics has not been able to stop environmental degradation and why desperately needed environmental and economic policy changes has been ineffective or absent.

In my department, I am a member of the Environment, sustainability transition and cultural practices research cluster as well as Comparative study of political culture research cluster.

During the period of 3/2022-2/2024 my research is funded by Finnish Cultura Foundation.

Keywords of my research: environmental history, environmental politics, American history, human-nature-relationship, politicization of natural phenomena