Dag Avango is Professor of History at the Division of Social Sciences, Luleå University of Technology. He has a scholarly background in archaeology and a PhD in the History of Technology. His research focuses on the history of industrial society, in particular extractive industries in the Arctic and Antarctic. Related fields are cultural heritage and environmental history. Based on the theoretical assumption that material objects and environments play an active role in society and therefore should be considered in explanations of historical change, his research is situated at the interface between archaeology and history. He led a number of large research projects on the historical relation between scientific research, extractive industries, and geopolitics, and has been principal investigator (PI) of the Nordic Center of Excellence REXSAC – Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities since 2019.
Lill Rastad Bjørst is an associate professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her academic career has focused on enhancing the role of social and human sciences in Arctic research. Her scientific focus areas are Inuit culture, society, climate change, sustainability, mining, industrialization, extractivism, postcolonialism, and tourism. One particular strength of her research profile is her many years of experience with research management as a PI, a work package leader (WPL), and the head of CIRCLA: Centre for Innovation and Research in Culture and Living in the Arctic.
Malin Brännström holds a PhD in Law and is the director of the Institute for Arctic Landscape Research, INSARC, and the Silvermuseet in Arjeplog, Sweden. She is also affiliated with the Department of Law and the Arctic Research Centre at Umeå University. Brännström is a legal scholar specialized in research on natural resources, Sámi land rights, and reindeer herding. Her current work is about the role of history in decision-making processes and how the Swedish legal system handles opposing interests, land use conflicts, and property rights.
Brigt Dale holds a PhD in Political Science and a master’s degree in Visual Anthropology and is Research Director at Nordland Research Institute, Norway. His work focuses on societal transformation, (ontological) security theory, governmentality, biopolitics, and cultural theory, and on the relation between security, power, and resource management. Dale’s empirical research includes the consequences of, and adaptation to, climate change, petroleum politics, and extractive industries and their impact on local communities, tourism, aquaculture, and cultural heritage. He has done fieldwork in Tobago (2001), the Lofoten Islands (2008–2010, and ongoing), Finnmark (2014, 2015), and Greenland (2014, 2019). Dale is an honorary professor at IBES Institute for Environment and Society at Brown University.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His textbooks in anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues, and Ethnicity and Nationalism, are widely used and translated, and his research concerns unintentional consequences of modernity, cultural aspects of globalization, and local responses to accelerated change. His latest books in English are Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016), Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (2018), and the coedited volume, with Marek Jakoubek, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today (2019). He is currently writing about the future of diversity in the light of accelerated globalization.
Sandra Fischer is a PhD student at the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University. Her research focuses mainly on water quality impacts from abandoned mines in northern Sweden. She has combined extensive water sampling campaigns in the field, laboratory work, and historical water quality records to contribute new insights about long-term metal contamination in colder climates, which were published in the journal Sustainability.
Anne-Cathrine Flyen is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and a PhD student at the Department of Architecture and Technology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has a scholarly background in architecture, and her PhD is within climate and human-induced degradation of cultural heritage in Arctic regions. Her research focuses on preserving important conservation values in physical buildings and built environments. Flyen has participated in EU-funded research projects in environmental monitoring and risk, and she has worked in Norway on the transformation of industrial heritage and biological degradation of cultural sites.
Christian Fohringer is a research associate at the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Environmental Studies (VFM) at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå, Sweden. As a PhD student in REXSAC, he examined the cumulative effects of land use and climate change on Arctic wildlife and Indigenous people. Through the lens of animal ecophysiology, he is combining an array of biomolecular, biotelemetry, and social-ecological approaches in order to identify where, when, and why animals and the communities that depend on them are most vulnerable to environmental stress.
Hannu I. Heikkinen is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Oulu. His research focuses on how human–environment relations and overall wellbeing and sustainability are mediated by culture and technology, particularly in Arctic and Northern societies. He is especially interested in participatory approaches, citizen science, resource rights, and environmental justice. Theoretically, he has focused on political ecologies of traditional livelihoods, cumulative impacts of industrial resource use, multispecies ethnography, and tourism. As a Docent of Environmental and Applied Anthropology, he has led and been involved in work on multiple transdisciplinary projects and in environment-related research institutions.
Vesa-Pekka Herva is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests encompass material culture, human–environment relations, and cosmology. He was PI of a major Academy of Finland-funded project “Understanding the Cultural Impact and Issues of Lapland Mining: A Long-Term Perspective on Sustainable Mining Policies in the North” (2014–2018). Herva has studied the European Arctic as a resource space from the perspective of extraction, tourism, and cultural heritage and is currently working on the cosmological dimensions of Arctic mining. He is the author, with Antti Lahelma, of Northern Archaeologies and Cosmologies: A Relational View (Routledge, 2019).
Arn Keeling is a professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. His research and publications focus on the historical geography and contemporary legacies of mineral development, environmental pollution, and remediation in the Canadian North. He is the co-editor of Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, and Memory (University of Calgary Press, 2015) and co-author of the book Mining Country (Lorimer, 2021), a general history of mining in Canada.
Teresa Komu is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the Arctic centre in the University of Lapland, Rovaniemi and with the University of Oulu, Finland. Teresa got her PhD in cultural anthropology with a thesis on the co-existence of reindeer herding, extractive industries, and nature-based tourism in northern Fennoscandia. Her research interests currently circle around the coexistence of competing livelihoods, northern human–environment relations, and the anthropology of the good. She has ten years of experience on doing research on Arctic mining from the viewpoints of participatory planning, land use conflicts, and cultural understandings of mining.
Joan Nymand Larsen is professor of Economics and Arctic Studies at University of Akureyri, Iceland, and research director at the Stefansson Arctic Institute, Akureyri. Her research focuses on Arctic economies and resource development, and the impact of industrial development, climate change, and global change processes for Northern regions and coastal communities. She has led work on Arctic human development and the study of living conditions and quality-of-life, including the construction of Arctic social indicators. Her current research is primarily field-based with a focus on close engagement with stakeholders in Greenland and in coastal zones across the Arctic.
Élise Lépy is an environmental geographer by training, with a PhD in Geography from the University of Caen-Normandy, France, and is currently a researcher at the University of Oulu. Her expertise is used in various international and multidisciplinary research projects on human–environment relationships in the Circumpolar North. She has built a long track record on Arctic environmental change and adaptation with a particular focus on climate impacts on traditional livelihoods. She explores the combined effects of multiple pressures on Arctic landscapes and communities, including Sámi, to understand the land use conflicts around natural resource extractions in Finnish and Swedish Lapland.
Marianne Elisabeth Lien is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. She has published widely on topics related to environmental issues and human–animal relations, and especially as they relate to food and domestication. She currently works in Finnmark, North Norway, where she has been doing fieldwork on and off since the mid-1980s, recently with a focus on resource extraction and colonizing practices. With Frida Hastrup, she has co-edited a special issue on Welfare Frontiers: Resource Practices in the Nordic Arctic Anthropocene (AJEC, 2020), and she is the author of Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish (University California Press, 2015).
Judit Malmgren is a PhD-student in history at Luleå University of Technology. Her research examines the complex relationship between local Arctic communities and large socio-technical systems connected to mining. Growing up in a sparsely populated municipality in Arctic Sweden, Malmgren has closely experienced a region challenged with depopulation, dependent on natural resource exploitation for its development and survival, and with a large Indigenous population. This has given her an understanding of some of the complex challenges and dilemmas facing the Arctic region today.
Annika E. Nilsson is an interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in Environmental Sciences. Her research focus is on the politics of Arctic change and environmental governance. Currently at Nordland Research Institute, Norway, she has previously been at Luleå University of Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden. She has been engaged in several assessments under the auspices of the Arctic Council, as science writer as a well as lead author. A recent book is Arctic Geopolitics, Media and Power (Routledge 2019). Her current research applies participatory scenario methods to identify governance challenges in social-ecological-technological systems.
Carl Österlin, PhD, is a researcher at the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University. With a background in land use planning and systems analysis, his research focuses on multiple pressures on Arctic landscapes, particularly how climate change and resource extraction affect traditional Sámi reindeer herding. His PhD work documented the rapid increase in natural resource extraction in northern Sweden, a line of work that he has continued in several transdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with Sámi reindeer herding communities.
Tina Paphitis is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow in Folklore at the University of Hertfordshire and a collaborative researcher on a project exploring the cultural significance of the underground in northern Fennoscandian extractive industries (Academy of Finland 2021–2025) at the University of Oulu. Her PhD at University College, London (2014) was on the medieval to contemporary folklore of archaeological landscapes, and her research interests include legends and landscapes in Britain and the Nordic region, environmental/ecocritical folklore, folklore and archaeology in fantasy and horror literature, and integrating folklore in critical heritage studies.
Albina Pashkevich is an associate professor in Tourism Studies at the Centre for Tourism and Leisure Research, Dalarna University, Sweden. Her research concentrates on Arctic tourism and contemporary uses of mining heritage. This includes representations of indigenous culture (Swedish Sami and Russian Nenets), tourism management, power relations, and institutional structures’ impact on tourism development. Currently she is a principal investigator of a research project on “Mining heritage as a resource for sustainable communities: Lessons for Sweden from the Arctic.”
Curt Persson is a senior lecturer in History at Luleå University of Technology. His research is focused on the history and heritage of industrial society and indigenous peoples, with a particular focus on the Fennoscandian Arctic. He has published on leadership and organization within the mining industry, and on the role of national minorities in mining and societal change. Another strand of his work concerns the Swedish state’s abuse of the Tornedalian and Meänkieli-speaking minority in northernmost Sweden. Persson served for twelve years as director of the Museum of Norrbotten – Sweden’s Arctic country museum.
Thierry Rodon is a professor of Political Science at Université Laval, Québec City and holds a Research Chair in Northern Sustainable Development. He leads MinErAL, an international research network on extractive industries and Indigenous livelihoods, with researchers and Indigenous partners in Canada, Australia, New Caledonia, and Fennoscandia. He is also the co-lead for the well-being theme on the Modern Treaty Implementation Research: Strengthening Our Shared Future. In addition, he has authored several publications on Indigenous policies and Arctic governance.
Gunhild Ninis Rosqvist has a professorship in Geography with an emphasis on Physical Geography at Stockholm University. She leads research in climate and environmental change and educates society through frequent outreach activities. She specializes on effects of climate change on mountain and polar environments, especially the cryosphere, and on mountain ecosystem services, especially reindeer herding. She was the director of Tarfala Research Station between 2005 and 2020, a Stockholm University infrastructure supporting Arctic and alpine environmental research and monitoring. Her annual measurements of the melting ice cap on the highest mountain in Sweden that dropped to the second highest are reported in media all over the world. Rosqvist has been the co-PI of REXSAC since 2016, developing cross-disciplinary research including traditional Sámi knowledge.
Simo Sarkki has a PhD in anthropology (2011) and holds the title of Docent in “anthropology of environmental governance” at the University of Oulu (2013), Finland. Sarkki has worked in various research projects related to environmental governance. His research interests include science–policy interfaces, social innovations, land use in northern areas, qualitative scenarios, participatory approaches, and multi-level governance under the broader theme of environmental governance. He is especially interested in understanding how spheres of society, science, and policy interlink in environmental decision-making.
Frank Sejersen is an associate professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. He pursues research within the field of anthropology and political ecology. His analytical focus is on cultural transitions, knowledge conflicts, environmental perception, and policies of sustainability. The regional focus is on the Arctic, where questions of climate, urbanization, indigenous rights, and societal dynamics are integrated into a larger analytical field of scaling practices, cultural translation, and identity politics. Ongoing work is on innovation, affective economies, and place- and future-making, themes that are also the focus of his book Greenland and the Arctic in the Era of Climate Change (Routledge 2015).
Zdenka Sokolíčková is a teaching and research associate at the Department of Studies in Culture and Religion, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. In 2019–2022 she was a guest researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, mentored by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Since 2021 she has worked as a postdoc at the Arctic Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research interests lie in the fields of anthropology of climate change, the Arctic, tourism, and migration, as well as transdisciplinary research on Svalbard’s environmental memory.
Sverker Sörlin is a professor in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, where he also works with the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. His current work includes the science politics of the cryosphere, climate change, and the Anthropocene. He has had a long career as a government advisor on research and environmental policy and served in the 2000s as the President of the Swedish Polar Committee and the National Committee for the Fourth International Polar Year. Among his books on Arctic topics are the edited Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments (UBC Press, 2013), Science, Geopolitics and Culture in the Polar Region (Ashgate, 2013), and Ice Humanities: Living, Thinking and Working in a Melting World (Manchester University Press, 2022).
Leena Suopajärvi works as a university lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi. She is also an adjunct professor at Oulu University, Faculty of Technology. Her special field is environmental sociology, especially themes related to natural resource governance from the point of local people in Finnish Lapland. In recent years, she has participated in numerous multidisciplinary projects and, for example, studied social impacts of mining and social license to operate (SLO).
Kirsten Thisted is an associate professor in the Minority Studies section, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She works across the disciplines of literary theory, language, history, and cultural studies, with a focus on how asymmetric power relations are negotiated. Her research has focused on the (literary) history of modern Greenland and Greenland–Denmark relations. She led an interdisciplinary project resulting in the two-volume work Denmark and the New North Atlantic – Narratives and Memories in a Former Empire (ed. with Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud, Aarhus University Press, 2020).
Camilla Winqvist is a PhD student in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Her thesis aims to explain under what circumstances legacies from mining in the past can become resources for communities in transition in the Fennoscandian Arctic. Her work explores different forms of re-use, environmental remediation, and ways to create new sources of income at abandoned mining sites. Winqvist uses methods and sources from history and archaeology, combining archival research, interviews, and field work at abandoned mining sites.
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