{"id":30602,"date":"2020-08-12T11:06:13","date_gmt":"2020-08-12T15:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardee\/?page_id=30602"},"modified":"2024-11-22T15:51:53","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T20:51:53","slug":"the-arctic-environmental-humanities-workshop-series","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardee\/research\/the-arctic-environmental-humanities-workshop-series\/","title":{"rendered":"The Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future<\/a> at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and the Scott Polar Research Institute<\/a> at the University of Cambridge are pleased to host the Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

This workshop series is a collaborative enterprise that is robustly interdisciplinary and brings together the diverse expertise of humanistic scholars, scientists, social scientists, and artists for a series of virtual presentations and conversations about Arctic issues.<\/p>\n

Read More<\/em><\/p>

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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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cicy humanities,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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Convenors<\/h4>\n
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Adriana Craciun
\nBoston University<\/h5>\n

Bio<\/p>


\nAdriana Craciun is the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities at Boston University. Her most recent book, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(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<\/em> (Palgrave, 2016) and with Mary Terrall, Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century<\/em> (Toronto UP, 2019). She has published widely on Arctic history and maritime exploration, in journals such as PMLA<\/em>, Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>, Atlantic Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, <\/em>and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies,<\/em> as well as in current international media regarding Arctic exploration heritage. She is currently writing two books: Arctic Enlightenments: Archives of Deep Time Floras,<\/em> 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<\/em> (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).
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Michael Bravo
\nUniversity of Cambridge<\/h5>\n

Bio<\/p>


\nMichael 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 Troms\u00f8. 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<\/em> (http:\/\/paninuittrails.org<\/a>) spanning the Canadian Arctic, and drawing on maps drawn by Inuit from land claims and historical literature. His books include Narrating the Arctic<\/em> (2002, ed. with S. S\u00f6rlin) and Arctic Geopolitics and Autonomy <\/em>(2011, ed. with N. Triscott). His latest book, North Pole<\/em>: Nature and Culture<\/em> (Reaktion, 2019) has received glowing reviews in New Scientist<\/em>, the Literary Review of Canada<\/em>, and Arctic Today. <\/em>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.
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Upcoming Presentations<\/h4>\n

Register to be notified of upcoming events<\/a><\/u><\/h5>\n
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Past Presentations<\/h4>\n

November 19, 2024<\/h5>\n

Greening the Arctic<\/p>\n

\u201cArctic greening\u201d describes the alarming increase of vegetation around the Northern world, which accelerates global warming and permafrost thaw. But greening in the Arctic also inspires economic, political, and imaginative innovation among local and Indigenous Arctic peoples, who are \u201cexperts of change,\u201d as Mininnguaq Kleist (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Greenland) affirmed at the Arctic Circle Assembly of 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cGreening\u201d thus means different things to different people. For social scientists, it is a deliberate introduction of plants into built environments. Ecologists and geographers each observe plants transforming Arctic lands through different lenses, with different results. For Arctic farmers, the increasing ability of plants to grow brings both new opportunities and unpredictability. How do we make sense of these different visions of greening? This panel discussion examined the dramatic expansion of plant life across the Arctic from a variety of viewpoints, considering the sciences and arts, and farms, forests, and tundra together.<\/p>\n

Panelists:
\nHannah Bradley,<\/strong> Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Engineering and Society, University of Virginia
\nInuk Silis H\u00f8egh,<\/strong> Filmmaker & Visual Artist; Director, The Green Land<\/em>; Director, Sum\u00e9: The Sound of a Revolution<\/em>
\nJeff Kerby,<\/strong> Senior Research Associate, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge; Visiting Fellow, Institute of Arctic Studies, Dartmouth College
\nKim Neider,<\/strong> Head Gardener, Upernaviarsuk Experimental Station, Greenland
\nRoss Virginia,<\/strong> Myers Family Professor of Environmental Science, Dartmouth College; former head of the U.S. State Department Fulbright Arctic Initiative<\/p>\n

Watch the presentation<\/h5>
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