Proposed Sessions

Development, or rather, lack of infrastructure is one of the main concerns of the Arctic regions and communities. Usually it is framed as state’s endeavor to organize governed people (Scott, 1998). In addition to formal, planned and strictly organized infrastructure, technologies, economies and socialities create infrastructures that are spontaneous, unregulated or ignored by state. While McFarlane and Vasudevan (2014) called for attention to informal infrastructures in southern cities, we find their importance in the Arctic and other remote communities too. In particular, the Arctic communities are well known for having provisioning systems and connectivities long before they were arranged by states. We invite presentations that are related to but are not limited by understanding informal infrastructures as parts of everyday lives, by-products of intimate human-environment relations or technological advances, sites of autonomy and emancipation, shadow economy, to name a few, in the Arctic and other remote communities.

This session is devoted to educational innovation and pedagogical scholarship related to the Arctic or Circumpolar North at university or secondary school, including not only regular classroom teaching, but also online delivery and non-traditional modes of learning (e.g. experiential or land-based learning). Papers regarding innovation or pedagogy in the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences are equally welcome. One main goal of this session is to understand better how teaching of the Arctic or Circumpolar North is embedded within certain ‘framings’ or ‘imaginaries’, and to investigate critically the institutional structures in which this teaching takes place. Another is to update participants on the launch and initial work of the new UArctic Læra Institute for Circumpolar Studies. It is hoped that this session will also go some way to promoting international linkages and the sharing of best practice between educators concerned with the Arctic or Circumpolar North.

"The session is devoted to indigenous languages of the Arctic. There are ca. 70 languages spoken in this part of the world: most of them belong to the eight big linguistic families and are seriously endangered. At the same time, the Arctic is the unique place of the northern hemisphere, where indigenous languages and indigenous knowledge is preserved much better than elsewhere. We discuss both synchronic and diachronic issues: what was the history of modern language communities of the Arctic, how contacts with other ethnic and linguistic groups contributed to the modern shapes of languages spoken in the Arctic today, what is the present state of these languages. This is an interdisciplinary session joining methods of linguistics proper, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, ethnography, anthropology, linguistic geography, and ethnohistory to describe the linguistic richness of the circumpolar world."

The Arctic is undergoing rapid environmental, socio-cultural geopolitical and economic transformation. This session aims at exploring how Arctic communities and stakeholders deal with the combined challenges from climate change, political, economic and resource pressures, changes to the global order and new social-cultural realities and what the future might hold for the Arctic. We invite papers that present interdisciplinary approaches to understanding long-term changes developed within the biophysical and social scholarship, such as studies of Arctic social-ecological systems, interaction of society and place, and future social-ecological change scenarios toward Arctic sustainability building at different scales. These papers will contribute to the understanding of long-term human responses to Arctic environmental change and long-term transformative impacts of human activities on Arctic ecosystems, including: (1) improving understandings of long-term human responses to specific climate change ‘events’; (2) providing insights into long-term human impacts on Arctic and sub-Arctic biological diversity; (3) enhancing understanding human strategic responses and decision-making ‘pathways’ in Arctic SES’s over generational time scales; and (4) engagement of the Indigenous knowledge in understanding social-ecological dynamics at different time and space scales.

This section will examine the sociocultural aspects of legal regulation of human subsistence and economy in the Arctic. It is proposed to discuss legal pluralism in the Arctic as the coexistence of international, religious, customary, state, precedent, corporate, and other legal regimes. We propose to pay special attention to the legal status of indigenous peoples, their support/discrimination by state and extracting industries. The focus will be on the mechanisms of legal regimes in regulating human-environment relations. We will look at mechanisms of mitigating risks and conflicts arising between different global and local forms of nature use and the respective local forms of law enforcement. Another important aspect will be the study of business communities and options for indigenous entrepreneurship and the interplay of informal and official institutions, aspects of social equality and inequality, corruption and the normative regulations of reciprocity and its coexistence with state legal systems. We propose to discuss how anthropologists participate in lawmaking and governance in the Arctic on national and international levels.