Environments, Movements, Narratives in the Circumpolar North: Final BOREAS Conference

This project supports the final BOREAS conference?October 28-31, 2009?to be held in Rovaniemi, Finland, at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland. This meeting is the capstone of the first major international collaborative research program in Arctic Social Sciences and Humanities (BOREAS), started in 2003 through a collaboration between the European Science Foundation, NSF, and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. This proposed Final Conference focuses on relationships between people and environments in the circumpolar North, with a strong emphasis on understanding the experience of local peoples living in the North. The objective of the conference is to discuss results; expose students and scholars outside BOREAS to the program?s innovative approach; and plan future research in the northern regions. In particular, support for the travel expenses of associated project partners, graduate students, indigenous consultants, and local scholars is being requested, alongside student and local institutional assistance for organizational purposes.

The BOREAS final conference hopes to demonstrate the relevance and leading role Northern research has in global agendas. Within the BOREAS international collaborative research projects (CPRs) there are significant contributions to the global discussion of the social and cultural effects of climate change. Explicit multidisciplinary approaches of BOREAS CRPs are contextualizing research on northern environments and specifically on climate change. Currently, several BOREAS projects are examining pre-historic social-cultural adaptations to environment and rapid environmental change, adding insight and comparative data on processes that are being observed today. BOREAS projects are also investigating the social and cultural context of climate change and its challenges to the social structure of Northern communities. Rural northern peoples having undergone the social and political changes of various colonial periods, are now faced with new external forces of change - rapid climate change and globalization. Research from the North has much to contribute to the dialog about global processes and their implications for social and cultural dynamics, such as: rural community relocations due to environmental changes, warfare, environmental degradation, and economic migration. Other BOREAS research project investigate subjects such as: missionization ? the cultural and metaphysical construction of reality and the political economy of religion/ and world view; the history of state policies toward land use and environment, enumeration programs, and how these affects ethnic identity, environmental awareness, and nationalism; with how people map their communities, their homes, and their environments - how culture creates geographic reality; and others.

Challenging the pervailing image of a static Arctic, the conference will explore the importance of movements (both seasonal and long-term), especially those associated with the creation, permanence and dissolution of communities, and ways in which these are mapped in ancient and new social forms; human engagement with a given or changing environment finds expression in narratives (histories, philosophies, mythologies, arts and other forms). The research to be discussed at the conference includes?indeed, goes beyond?the recording of human techniques of local ecological adaptation in extreme environments by exploring the philosophical and spiritual foundations of such knowledge in the circumpolar North. In addition, BOREAS studies have aimed to trace the dynamics that shape the transmission of knowing about sustainability in a fragile world, and the ways that science and ideology create conceptual landscapes of the Arctic that help keep this region open for colonization and military reconnaissance, as well as nature conservation.

The BOREAS final conference, ?Environments, Movements, Narratives in the Circumpolar North,? will bring together junior- and senior-level scholars with students and indigenous scholars from all of the seven BOREAS CRPs. Previous conferences and dissemination activities have involved only selected personnel. The student participants will be chosen based on a student essay indicating how their participation in the BOREAS conference will further their interest/careers in science along with a recommendation from a professor or other mentor. The students? essays will be judged by the conference organizing committee, and the student participants will be chosen on the basis of that judgment. In order to increase the participation of underrepresented groups, the BOREAS researchers will advertise this opportunity to students through groups serving minority students such as, the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program (ANSEP), Advancing Hispanics/Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), and others, such as ArcticNet.

This final conference will provide opportunities for new partnerships, synergies, and cross-cutting publications and will showcase Northern research at the forefront of social science and humanities disciplines ? the way it was a century ago following Franz Boas ? coincidentally, on the heels of the first International Polar Year in 1882-83, when Boas introduced a social science agenda into studies of sea ice.