Organised by the members and collaborators of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project, which is based at Tampere University and funded by the Academy of Finland, this international conference responds to the recent global interest in the Arctic. 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).

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 are invited.  In line with the interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project, contributions from a range of fields and disciplines, collaborative presentations, as well as creative presentations at the intersection of art and research are welcome. Proposals for pre-formed panels are also welcome.

 

In accordance with the general aims of the conference, submissions for 20-minute presentations that may relate to (but need not be limited to) the following areas are invited:

  • 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

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is August 31, 2021.

Read more here.