Britt Kramvig

Professor, Department of Tourism and Northern Studies, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

My current research project engages with sustainability, decolonisation and indigenous/Sámi ways of knowing; in particular as expressed through land- and seascape as well as in artistic practices and festivals. The world that emerge from indigenous peoples’ experiences and practices can see the examples of the possibilities of other worlds that we need to learn from in order to address environmental issues.

Ongoing publication effort engage with locally embedded practice of reconciliation, memories and landscape. I have been one of the editorial team of Recognition, Reconciliation and Restoration.

For some years now I have worked with Prof. Helen Verran on storytelling and together we argue that we should not merely focus on stories as products, but also on storytelling as an intersection in reciprocity. Storytelling can therefore inform an emergent politics of memory and enact landscapes of remembrance. This emphasises the importance of not only the substance of the stories, but also the very act of participating in a shared event. It also emphasises how this event brings our attention to our sense of being with-others, so promoting relation-weaving and world-making in which the past and the future are recalled as well as remade.

The world can be remade through stories but do filmmaking offer such an opportunity? For that reason I have been engaged in several creative documentaries. Dreamland with Rachel Andersen Gomez and Firekeepers with Rachel Andersen Gomez and Rossella Regazzi.  

In 2015- 2016, I was fellow at Centre for Advanced Studies on the project “Domestication in Era of the Anthropocene in the Arctic” lead by Prof. M. Lien (UiO). From 2013-2016, I was Norwegian PI on the HERA-project: Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North. During the period of 2016-2021, I’m a research partner at the Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities lead by Prof. Sverker Sörlin from KTH, Sweden and a member in the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar research. In the ongoing project OKTA Sami art and social communities; I do work and publish not only on artistic practices, but think together with and learn from artists and curators.

At UiT The Arctic University of Norway, I’m a member of the research group Indigenous Voices (IVO) - Álgoálbmogii jienat and of Narrating the postcolonial North.

Latest publications

Stories of reconciliation enacted in the everyday life of Sámi entrepreneurs, Acta Borealis.

Pluriversal stories with Indigenous wor(l)ds creating paths behind the next mountain, in Dutkansearvi Journal. 3 (2) 149 – 172.