Call for Abstracts
Arctic Congress 2024
29 May-3 June 2024
Bodø, Norway
Abstract submission deadline: 5 January 2024 at 5:00 p.m. Central European Time
For more information about the meeting, go to:
https://www.arcticcongress.com
For more information about sessions, go to:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63eb4a8a6b16144d7af2f6db/t/65803… (PDF - 788 KB)
Organizers invite abstracts for the Arctic Congress 2024. This conference will convene 29 May-3 June 2024 in Bodø, Norway.
The conveners of the following sessions and panels invite abstracts:
SESSION 5.14: Strategies from Indigenous-led and Collaborative Projects for Knowledge Sharing and Data Sovereignty in Arctic Research
Conveners: Noor Johnson and Tatiana Degai
Across the Arctic, Indigenous communities and organizations are leading research projects that document knowledge and observations supporting a wide range of community priorities, including chronicling cultural heritage and language revitalization and community-based observing of environmental change. These projects utilize diverse strategies, tools, and technologies to collect, manage, and share information to support decision-making and youth engagement. In this session, conveners invite projects or community-engaged researchers to share their strategies for documenting, preserving, and sharing knowledge so that it can be useful to communities, researchers, educators, planners, and policy makers. The session will include experiences from the ELOKA network (Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic) to support the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of local observations and knowledge of the Arctic while respecting Indigenous data sovereignty.
SESSION 4.5.1: Strategies for Centering Indigenous Voices in Arctic Community-led Research and Co-production of Knowledge for Early Career Researchers
Conveners: Natasha Haycock-Chavez and Mariama Dryak-Vallies
Given the history of extractive research in the Arctic, there is increasing recognition amongst researchers about the importance of intentional and respectful engagement and equity with Arctic Indigenous communities. Indigenous researchers and communities are also calling for greater involvement in research, often in the form of community-led research, co-production of knowledge, and/or community-based monitoring. Early career researchers are involved in this type of research and are excellently positioned to be positive agents of change. At the same time, expectations for early career researchers to ‘produce’ on short timelines early in their careers can pose additional challenges to building long-term, respectful, and intentional relationships with communities they are working within in the near-term.
Conveners welcome abstracts for talks from researchers and community members in all stages of their career involved in community-led research or co-production of knowledge to share their work, including lessons, stories, and strategies for successful capacity sharing. Conveners encourage abstracts with an emphasis on how early career researchers working to center Indigenous voices in their research can do so effectively. Stories of success and failures are welcomed, and conveners intend to create a space for shared learning and reflection. Early career Indigenous researchers are especially encouraged to submit.
This session will be structured to create space for knowledge exchange, capacity sharing, and participation. Conveners will begin the session with a series of talks, and the remaining time will be dedicated to a round table discussion between the panelists and an opportunity to hear from and engage with audience-members.
SESSION 2.4.3: Should I Stay or Should I Go Now: Community Relocation, Managed Retreat, and Migration in the North
Conveners: Guangqing Chi and Davin Holen
Climate change is a slow-moving disaster. In the North, coastal predominately indigenous communities are experiencing climate impacts, including thawing permafrost leading to coastal land loss and disappearance of lakes, extreme storms causing land loss and coastal inundation, and declining sea ice leading to unsafe traveling and hunting conditions. One response to these challenges is to relocate the entire community, which is problematic. Complete relocation to a new location means learning about new hunting, fishing, and gathering areas distancing the community and culture from ancestral homelands. Relocation is also prohibitively expensive.
Alternatively, communities may choose to slowly retreat to safer ground close by as funding becomes available. Individuals and families may also choose to migrate to urban centers because of compounding climate and social factors. But still many people choose to stay despite the challenges. Research on Northern out-migration and relocation has been minimal, even for the most threatened communities. This session calls for papers that examine the drivers and processes of relocation, managed retreat, and migration. It also calls for stories and narratives of the experiences of people in the North who are dealing with these choices.
SESSION: 5.15: Arctic Futures: Local Visions and Global Projections
Conveners: Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk
The Arctic does not only have a long history of boom-and-bust-cycles, often based on resource extraction, but also is a region associated with the promises of growth and prosperity. As the Arctic has become an arena for industrial and infrastructural development, militarization, and the impacts of climate change processes, the imagined futures of this vast region have become an important topic of conversation and research.
Future imaginaries of the Arctic that are driven by global economic interests, geopolitical constellations, and international mega-project engineering often fail to represent local and Indigenous voices, needs, and concerns. Only in recent years, Arctic communities and residents have become more engaged – and partially more empowered – to participate in planning and decision-making about the future(s) of their home areas. However, a lot needs to be done to achieve fair and equitable involvement of local communities in research and policy activities about their futures.
This session invites a variety of perspectives and approaches to the topic, ranging from historical treatments of “Arctic futurology” to ethnographic futures research, from experiences with scenario building and visioning exercises to participatory planning. The session calls for theoretical and methodological contributions – and applied case studies – from the social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as from Arctic residents, knowledge holders, practitioners, and planners.
For questions, please contact:
Peter Schweitzer
Email: peter.schweitzer [at] univie.ac.at
Cristóbal Adam-Barrios
Email: cristobal.adam.barrios [at] univie.ac.at
SESSION 5.11: Transport Infrastructure and Population in the Arctic
Convener: Timothy Heleniak
This session calls for papers examining the linkages between transport infrastructure and population change in the Arctic. Transport infrastructure includes roads, railroads, airports, and ports. The session is part of the project InfraNorth (Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities). The key question in the project is What is the role of transport infrastructures in sustaining northern communities? This session invites papers which investigate the impact of existing or planned transport infrastructure on population change across the Arctic. A railroad can lead to significant population increase to a settlement or spell the demise if it is not routed to a town. Roads can provide valuable linkages which allow populations to continue to grow or improve the population structure such as retaining young people. An example of this is the extensive road and tunnel network in the Faroe Islands. Airports also play a role in providing access for outsiders to Arctic settlements and boost population whereas they might have otherwise declined. Air travel was crucial to the expansion of population across the Arctic in the early twentieth century. Ports have been important for fishing and shipping and have been the locus of population growth and concentration in many places in the Arctic.
Both theoretical and practical papers based on case studies of specific infrastructure projects are welcome.
For questions, please contact:
Peter Schweitzer
Email: peter.schweitzer [at] univie.ac.at
Cristóbal Adam-Barrios
Email: cristobal.adam.barrios [at] univie.ac.at
SESSION 4.1.8: Can Infrastructure Contribute to Sustainability? The Built Environment and Arctic Communities
Conveners: Ria-Maria Adams and Alexandra Meyer
This session investigates the role of the built environment and infrastructures in enabling and promoting sustainable and viable Arctic communities. We understand infrastructures as “terrains of power and contestation” (following Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018) and the built environment forming a relation between humans, non-humans and technology (Larkin, 2018). Infrastructures and built environments are often described as a crucial interface between environmental change and community dynamics.
They simultaneously create dependencies and promises of development, and are often contested locally. We understand infrastructures in the broad sense, encompassing material and immaterial aspects.
The aim of the session is to explore the implications of existing and planned infrastructures in the Arctic, and how they actualize complex relationships between supra-local actors and local communities.
Furthermore, conveners want to discuss the role of ethnographic research on infrastructure and the built environment. In this, we seek contributions on topics ranging from the role of transport infrastructures for Arctic communities, debates on the “Green Transition”, conflicts over infrastructure, tourism, military infrastructure, to resource extraction. In this context, conveners encourage critical reflections on the notion of “sustainability”, as well as its relation to infrastructures and the built environment.
By facilitating interdisciplinary discussions and by highlighting ethnographic perspectives, this session intends to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the built environment, infrastructures, and sustainability in Arctic communities.
For questions, please contact:
Peter Schweitzer
Email: peter.schweitzer [at] univie.ac.at
Cristóbal Adam-Barrios
Email: cristobal.adam.barrios [at] univie.ac.at
Abstract submission deadline: 5 January 2024 at 5:00 p.m. Central European Time
For more information about the meeting, go to:
https://www.arcticcongress.com
For more information about sessions, go to:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63eb4a8a6b16144d7af2f6db/t/65803… (PDF - 788 KB)