Call for Papers for Conference "Mediating Arctic Geographies"

If you are interested in contemporary imaginaries of the circumpolar world, please submit an abstract by May 31!

The Mediated Arctic Geographies project, which is based at Tampere University and funded by the Academy of Finland, will organize an international conference entitled Mediating Arctic Geographies: Contemporary Imaginaries of the Circumpolar World in Inari, Finland, 11–12 August 2021.

The conference responds to the recent global interest in the Arctic. 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.

In parallel to this, the last twenty years have seen a drastic increase in fictional and artistic representations of the Arctic, both by “Southern” and indigenous voices. 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.

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

If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please send an abstract of 200–300 words and a short biographical note (no more than 100 words) to Johannes Riquet (johannes.riquet@tuni.fi) in a single Word file.

The deadline for proposals is 31 May 2021, and submitters will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 8 June 2021.

NB! The organizers are hoping to hold the conference as a (predominantly) live event, but due to the uncertainty caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various hybrid models are possible. For the latest information and questions, please consult the conference website.