The Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series
The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge are pleased to host the Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series.
As the Arctic gains greater visibility among academics and diverse publics, we see an urgent need for humanities scholars to help shape the current debates and research priorities too often limited to the natural and social sciences. This rise in awareness of Arctic issues coincides with widespread academic initiatives in the emerging interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. These growing interests in the Arctic and in the environmental humanities are in turn both catalyzed by the climate crisis; the urgency of this crisis is central to, but not exhaustive of, our collective commitment to Arctic environmental humanities (AEH).
We envision this workshop series as a collaborative enterprise that is robustly interdisciplinary and brings together diverse expertise of humanistic scholars, artists, and researchers drawn from international circles. Presentations and conversations will take place in varied formats, all online and freely accessible to all those interested. The perspectives and participation of northern communities and people will be particularly valuable and encouraged.
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The Arctic world is dominated by ice, serving as a challenging interface between land and water, a highway connecting the travels and stories of Indigenous communities, a storehouse of the planet’s deep environmental memory, and a central component of planetary life, the cryosphere. Geologically and ecologically, the Arctic includes some of the oldest rocks and traces of life on the planet, as well as some of the youngest and most fragile ecosystems. Human civilizations in the Arctic stretch back millennia and include the most astonishing migrations we have ever accomplished as a species, establishing global trade routes across the northernmost habitable lands on Earth many thousands of years ago. Though often imagined by outsiders as a timeless, uninhabited, and sublime wasteland, the Arctic is a dynamic, heterogeneous world which millions of diverse occupants call home: from industrial cities, to small hamlets, to remote wildernesses, the northern world is connected by human and nonhuman activities unfolding over deep time. Today the unique pressures Indigenous Arctic peoples face due to the climate disruption, pollution, and cultural trauma generated by distant cities and nations are unprecedented. The crises faced by Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar world, converging around an ocean surrounded by three continents and vast archipelagoes, invite us to rethink geopolitical and regional paradigms such as East/West and North/South (indeed, the Arctic has sometimes been called the South of the North).
This richness in human and environmental histories is nevertheless often reduced in public discourses to the narrow significance of the Arctic as a sentinel of the climate crisis and a resource frontier, similar to the reduction of the Arctic world to just an environment (consider, for example, where most news stories about the Arctic are filed under). The humanities need to play a crucial role in highlighting the longer histories of the Arctic world as a deliberate challenge to the present focus on the Arctic as solely an indicator of future climate doom or resource boom, an often reductive approach made possible through the quantitative metrics of monetization. Within the emergent environmental humanities field, this workshop series can offer unique insights and focus onto the central role the cryosphere plays, along with the biosphere and lithosphere, in shaping life on earth. Social science and humanities scholars have recently begun articulating emergent critiques under the rubrics of cryopolitics, cryo-history, Arctic humanities, and “icy humanities,” foregrounding the significance of the Arctic world, its people, narratives, and more-than-human agents and forces, in shaping planetary life and geopolitics. Our knowledge of the planetary power of the cryosphere is also drawn from environmental sciences, and from Traditional Environmental Knowledge (and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) developed over centuries by Inuit and other Indigenous peoples. We see AEH as collaborating with and learning from the unique expertise grounded in the sciences and in Indigenous forms of knowledge.
Convenors
Adriana Craciun
Boston University
Bio
Adriana Craciun is the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities at Boston University. Her most recent book,
Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2016 Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts. With Simon Schaffer she edited
The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences (Palgrave, 2016) and with Mary Terrall,
Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto UP, 2019). She has published widely on Arctic history and maritime exploration, in journals such as
PMLA,
Eighteenth-Century Studies,
Atlantic Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, as well as in current international media regarding Arctic exploration heritage. She is currently writing two books:
Arctic Enlightenments: Archives of Deep Time Floras, on the history of botanical collecting, plant longevity, and phytogeography, from the Enlightenment to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault; and a second book, co-authored with Michael Bravo, titled
Through the Living Arctic (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).
Michael Bravo
University of Cambridge
Bio
Michael Bravo is based at the Scott Polar Research Institute, where he has recently served as a member of the Senior Management Group and as Acting Director of the institute. He is also Head of the Circumpolar History and Public Policy Research Group and a Senior Associate Scientist at the Stefansson Arctic Institute (Iceland). Michael has also held a visiting Professorship at Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Very early in his career Michael travelled to the High Arctic and became captivated by the oral tradition and memory of the Inuit people and their historical encounters with the explorers, whalers, and missionaries. Michael read for a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science (Cambridge, 1992). This brought him into the community of historians of science and environmental historians. In June 2014, he launched with Canadian partners an online
Pan-Inuit Trails Atlas (
http://paninuittrails.org) spanning the Canadian Arctic, and drawing on maps drawn by Inuit from land claims and historical literature. His books include
Narrating the Arctic (2002, ed. with S. Sörlin) and
Arctic Geopolitics and Autonomy (2011, ed. with N. Triscott). His latest book,
North Pole:
Nature and Culture (Reaktion, 2019) has received glowing reviews in
New Scientist, the
Literary Review of Canada, and
Arctic Today. It has also featured at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas and Stoke Newington Literary Festival, and has been selected by NetGalley as a Non-fiction Featured Book.
Upcoming Presentations
Past Presentations
November 28, 2022
“Climate Repair and Governance: Science and Ethics”
Panelists:
Erin Dockins, PhD Candidate, The Glacier Lab at the University of Oregon
Sonja Klinsky, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University
Stefanie Mack, Scientific Programme Manager, The Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge
Maria Antonieta “Antoinette” Nestor, Engagement Manager, The Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge
Henrik Selin, Associate Dean for Studies & Associate Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University
April 5, 2022
“Icy Humanities: A Collaborative Symposium”
Session I: Icy Humanities
Prof. Mia Bennett, Geography, University of Washington
Prof. Mark Carey, History & Environmental Studies, University of Oregon; Director, Environmental Studies Program
Siobhan Mcdonald, Artist
Zachary Provant, PhD student, Environmental Studies, University of Oregon
Session II: Glaciology and Society
Rebecca Dell, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Prof. Sérgio H. Faria, Ikerbasque Research Professor, Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3)
Prof. Mark Jackson, Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Sarah Tingey, PhD student, Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
November 16, 2021
“Curating the Arctic: Northern Museums and Decolonization”
Sven Haakanson
Genevieve LeMoine
October 12, 2021
“What Can We Learn from Ignorance? Arctic Energy Frontiers, Environmental Regimes, and Indigenous Rights Movements Since the 1970s”
Prof. Andrew Stuhl
Contact us for the video recording
May 10, 2021
“Cloudberries and Icebreakers: Filming Real and Imagined Journeys in the Russian Arctic”
Ruth Maclennan
March 30, 2021
“Daughters of the Snow”: BBC Radio 4 program featuring Michael Bravo and Adriana Craciun
March 2, 2021
“Mediated Arctic: The Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Arctic Geographies”
Johannes Riquet, Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Markku Salmela, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport
The Mediated Arctic Geographies Project (Tampere University, Finland)
January 28, 2021
“Ataramik (Always): A Conversation with Reneltta Arluk”
Reneltta Arluk (Inuvialuit, Dene, Cree)
Director of Indigenous Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Director, Akpik Theatre
December 17, 2020
“Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution and Greenland Today”
Inuk Silis Høegh
Director of Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution
October 13, 2020
“Arctic Energy Before Petroleum: Or, What Whales Can Tell Us About Writing History”
Bathsheba Demuth
Assistant Professor of History & Environment and Society, Brown University
***Read Chapter 4 (“The Waking Ice”) of Demuth’s 2019 book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait: DOWNLOAD HERE
September 29, 2020
“Why We Should Develop Arctic Humanities”
Sverker Sörlin
Professor of Environmental History, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory
September 1, 2020
“The Shaggy Saviour of Northern Norway”
Dolly Jørgensen
Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway
Co-editor of Environmental Humanities, 2020-22