The project
Premise
The research project Mediated Arctic Geographies studies the poetics and politics of Arctic geography in contemporary fiction and art.
It investigates how Arctic geospheres are aesthetically shaped and mediated to become vehicles of environmental, (geo)political and social concerns.
Reading contemporary literature, film and art against the background of earlier Arctic discourses, it examines global anxieties and fantasies projected onto the High North as well as artistic perspectives on lived experience in the circumpolar world – and connects these present-day imaginaries with a long history of imaginative investment in the spaces of the Arctic.
Why the project matters
Mediated Arctic Geographies explores how elements of Arctic physical geography – such as snow and ice, subterranean and submarine spaces, rivers, the tundra, and permafrost – are invested with a set of meanings that speak to contemporary environmental and social concerns as well as the geopolitical conflicts that are linked to them.
Representations of Arctic geography are studied both in their materiality and in their mediality: the project examines the physical and medial spheres through which contemporary Arctic imaginaries are created. It draws attention to the environmental, social and geopolitical relevance of Arctic geospheres in a rapidly evolving body of literature and art, set in a rapidly changing polar landscape.
Combined voices
The project brings together a plurality of voices from within and outside the circumpolar Arctic, both in terms of the works analysed and the people contributing to it.
Placing Indigenous and ‘Western’ or ‘Southern’ imaginations of Arctic geography side by side, we combine different epistemologies in order to do justice to these imaginaries in their diversity.
This plurality of voices is put in practice through the combined work of researchers from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds. The multidisciplinarity of our project is reflected in the variety of the works analysed. From Disney’s Frozen franchise to the documentary Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, from Arctic exhibitions to sealhunting debates, from the Canadian collection Arctic Comics to the British TV series Fortitude, we approach the Arctic through the multiplicity of discourses that shape it. Moreover, we aim our research to be inclusive of non-academic voices by engaging, throughout the duration of the project, with artists, communities, and local agents.
Funding and home university
The project is funded by the Academy of Finland (1 September 2019 - 31 August 2023), and is based at Tampere University, in collaboration with various other universities.
Expected Outcomes
A co-authored book on The Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Arctic Geographies (working title).
This book will focus on how contemporary literature and art poeticises various elements of Arctic geography, and in doing so negotiates pressing environmental, social and geopolitical concerns. The chapters will be written in English by the members of the research team as well as the project’s international collaborators. The book will be truly collaborative and interdisciplinary as each chapter will be co-authored by a group of scholars with different geographical and/or disciplinary backgrounds. This will create a dialogue between various voices from within and outside the Arctic, and between literary and cultural studies on the one hand and cultural and political geography, geopolitics, meteorology, Indigenous studies, and tourism studies on the other.
Expected time of publication: December 2021
Organisation of an international conference entitled “Mediating Arctic Geographies.”
The conference will bring together project members, collaborators, artists and selected participants. The conference will function as a catalyst for the planning of the second book (see below).
The conference will take place at Tampere University in 2021.
A second book on (Re-)mediating Arctic Geospheres: Environment, Resources, Geopolitics (working title).
The book will contain essays by the research team, international collaborators, as well as papers chosen on the basis of a call for papers following the international conference “Mediating Arctic Geographies”. The book will be thoroughly multilingual. Alongside various contributions in English, it will - so we hope - also include chapters in varous language spoken in different parts of the circumpolar world, such as Kalaallisut (Western Greenlandic), French, Sámi, the Nordic languages, Russian, Finnish, and Inuktitut.
Expected time of publication: May 2023.
A final seminar that will conclude the project by bringing together local and national as well as selected international collaborators of the project.
The purpose of the seminar will be to consolidate the main insights gained in the course of the project and identify open questions and concerns that emerged from it so as to prepare the ground for possible future collaborations. If possible, the second book will be launched during this seminar.
The final seminar will take place in 2023 (possibly in Nuuk at the Ilisimatusarfik - University of Greenland).
The goal of these publications and events is to increase awareness of the Arctic imaginaries studied in the project and their (geo)political, social and environmental significance.
