Guro Nordby Editor

Inger Birkeland is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), where she teaches nature-society relations, people-place relations, and education for sustainable development at the BA and MA levels in teacher education and culture studies. She supervises master students and doctoral candidates in teacher education and culture studies, has led the research group: Heritage in Use, and served on the board of USN’s doctoral program in Culture Studies. Her research interests since 2005 have been related to strengthening the cultural sustainability of the post-industrial communities of Rjukan and Notodden.

Steffen Fagernes Johannessen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Culture, Religion and Social Studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). He obtained his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, supported by a grant from the Max Planck Institute. Johannessen has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Indian Ocean, the UK, and around the Rjukan–Notodden Industrial Heritage site in Norway. His research focuses on socio-political memory and identity in relation to heritagisation processes, forced mobility, and performance. Currently, Johannessen leads the Heritage in Use Research Group and serves as USN’s observer on the World Heritage Board for the Rjukan–Notodden Industrial Heritage.

Guro Nordby is employed as a researcher at the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum. She holds a Magister Artium in Ethnology from the University of Oslo and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). Her doctoral thesis focused on the Rjukan Railway, a museum railway of great importance to the industrial development in the region. Nordby has also authored and co-authored several non-fiction books on urban and rural history.

Benjamin Richards holds a Ph.D. in Culture Studies from the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). He works at Hardanger and Voss Museum and is a member of the Heritage in Use research group. Richards’ thesis explores themes of heritage, sustainability and becoming through research within the Rjukan-Notodden World Heritage Site. He has a background in filmmaking, heritage studies, ecological economics and border studies, with special interest in visual, sensory and phenomenological research methods.