MEDIATING ARCTIC GEOGRAPHIES: CONTEMPORARY IMAGINARIES OF THE CIRCUMPOLAR WORLD
International Conference in Inari (Finland), NEW DATES: 9-11 JUNE 2022
Since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Arctic (understood here as the circumpolar region around and north of the Arctic Circle) has entered worldwide public discussion to an unprecedented extent. As a global climate archive and the site of various scrambles for resources, it has become the centre of attention within debates on climate change and global geopolitics. The international stir created by the planting of a Russian flag under the Arctic sea ice in 2007 and a Chinese flag at the North Pole in 2012, the politicisation of the recovery of the two shipwrecks from John Franklin’s disastrous 1845 expedition in 2014 and 2016, and Donald Trump’s controversial overturning of Barack Obama’s ban on oil drilling in the Arctic are spectacular examples of this new hypervisibility of the Arctic in international politics and global media.
Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen, Denmark,60x80cm, (2004), from Melting Barricades (Inuk Silis Høegh and A Havsteen-Mikkelsen)
In parallel to this, the last twenty years have seen a drastic increase in fictional and artistic representations of the Arctic. Examples include the ongoing Finnish/German TV series Arctic Circle (2018-), Sarah Moss’s novel Cold Earth (2009), and the Australian/Canadian disaster film Arctic Blast (2010). Closely related to these narratives set in the Arctic are works that strongly evoke Arctic or polar environments, such as the Korean thriller Snowpiercer (2013), which takes place on a frozen Earth, or the German/Canadian coproduction Ice Planet (2001). Indigenous authors, filmmakers, and artists have also increasingly offered inside mediations of the Arctic that are often very different (and sometimes directly challenge) “Southern” depictions of Arctic geography. They have been highly significant in the context of Indigenous rights and independence movements and played an important role in creating and strengthening circumpolar links and networks. Ranging from literature (e.g. Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth, 2018) and film (e.g Greenlandic director Pipaluk Kreutzmann Jørgensen’s Anori, 2018) to hip hop (e.g. Priscilla Naunġaġiaq Hensley and David Holthouse’s documentary film WE UP: Indigenous Hip Hop from the Circumpolar North, 2017) and comics (e.g. the Arctic stories in Moonshot, 2016/2020), these works often turn to the land, the water, and the air as they revive, reinvent, and remediate Indigenous storytelling traditions and ancestral knowledge.
Organised by the members and collaborators of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project, which is based at Tampere University and funded by the Academy of Finland, this international conference responds to the recent global interest in the Arctic. How geography is mediated and imagined matters profoundly: there is a world of difference between the figuration of ice as a sublime backdrop in Jeff Orlowski’s climate change documentary Chasing Ice (2011) and the presentation of ice and snow as a life-sustaining sphere in Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold (2015). We invite reflections on the role of art and the imagination in shaping, transforming, and contesting ideas about geography, and on the social, political, and environmental consequences of these mediations. In line with the interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project, we welcome contributions from a range of fields and disciplines, collaborative presentations, as well as creative presentations at the intersection of art and research. Proposals for pre-formed panels are also welcome.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Jen Rose Smith (Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Harald Gaski (Professor in Sámi Culture and Literature at Sámi allaskuvla / Sámi University of Applied Sciences)
Liisa Holmberg (Film Commissioner, International Sámi Film Institute)
Call for papers
In accordance with the general aims of the conference, we invite submissions for 20-minute presentations that may relate to (but need not be limited to) the following areas:
Contemporary Arctic imaginaries and narratives
Circumpolar connections in culture and art
Arctic cinema and visual culture
The poetics of snow and ice
Imaginative cartographies of the Arctic
Specific geospheres (e.g. rivers, coastlines…) in fiction and art
Indigenous figurations of geography in the circumpolar world
Literary and cultural geographies of the Arctic
Territorial vs. non-territorial geographical imaginaries
Arctic remediations of oral culture and storytelling in new media
Western/Southern vs. Indigenous figurations of Arctic geography
Contemporary transformations of historical mediations of the Arctic
Different concepts of geography and space in an Arctic context
The role of the land in Indigenous Arctic literature and artistic practice
Neocolonial imaginaries of the Arctic
Postcolonial and decolonial Arctic imaginaries
Planetarity and circumpolarity
Registration
The deadline for abstracts has passed, but it is still possible to register as an auditor. The following link will take you to the registration platform:
https://www.lyyti.fi/reg/mediatingarcticgeographies2022
Please register by 20 May.
organisation
The conference will be organised as a predominantly live event (though online participation is also possible).
Conference fee
The conference fee is 100 Euros and includes coffee breaks as well as lunches. A reduced conference fee (50 Euros) applies for online participants.
inquiries
conference programme and book of abstracts
Book of abstracts (including final programme)
Prof. Johannes Riquet
and the Mediated Arctic Geographies team
Tampere University