CIRCLA holiday greetings 2020

As some of us joined the AAU Arctic Steering committee meeting at Klitgaarden in January or welcomed the first UArctic Congress to Copenhagen in February, little did we know that 2020 was going to be a very different year! As we soon learnt, however, few things turned out as planned as Covid-19 swept across the planet, leaving cancelled travels, conferences and meetings in its wake.

Our 2019 holiday greetings ended with the famous last words “See you out there in 2020”! In most cases, this turned out not to be true; kick-off meetings for the research projects FACE-IT and Sustainable Arctic Cruise Communities were held online, conference participation in ICASS and IASC were cancelled, and most fieldwork was put on hold. An exception to this rule was physical kick-off for the Imagine POCO project, allowed during the brief summer reopening which also allowed for travelling and fieldwork.

Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, and a positive outcome of the shutdown turned out to be intense progress with regard to online meeting skills. Halfway into 2020 we were Skyping, Teaming and Zooming away, discovering (by way of a steep learning curve) new ways to communicate and interact online. In CIRCLA, we took advantage of the new format of the digital PhD defense, which in the case of Naja Dyrendom Graugaard turned out successfully in April, as she defended her thesis ‘Tracing Seal: Unsettling Narratives of Kalaallit Seal Relations’ -- not least because the format allowed for many attendants from the Arctic who would otherwise have been prevented from joining. Congratulations to Naja, who continues her work in Arctic research at AAU through a postdoc on mining and gender, at the Department of Planning.

This year, we were saddened to say goodbye to Ulrik Pram Gad, who has taken on a research position at DIIS. Ulrik remains connected to CIRLCA in work, heart and spirit, and Mette, Lill and Carina as well as Rikke Becker Jacobsen from the Center of Blue Governance remain associated to the Imagine POCO project, as does Sophie Rud. Sophie will also be assisting in the planning of the forthcoming ‘Greenland-Denmark 1721-2021’conference, which -- upon long and careful deliberations -- has been postponed to June by the organizing committee to (hopefully) ensure a proper, physical conference.

In March, Lill Rastad Bjørst visited Arctic colleagues at Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at Cambridge University and the SPRI group will join CIRCLA in Copenhagen for the ‘Greenland-Denmark 1721-2021’ conference. CIRCLA also hosted several Arctic Politics seminars in 2020 in Copenhagen, organized by Sophie Rud and Ulrik Pram Gad.

Arctic studies

Robert C. Thomsen is back from management duties, happily re-engaging with research and teaching. His first research project is entitled ‘Colonialism, indigenism and nationalism in the Hans Egede statue debate’ and from Robert goes a heartfelt thanks to all those who engaged in constructive discussion about it at the October CIRCLA seminar!

Robert also takes over from Lill as coordinator of the Arctic Studies specialisation – this semester with about 20 students attending the course on ‘Cultures, Societies and Histories of the Peoples of the Arctic’ and no less than 15 students doing the exam. An exciting team of specialists have been assembled to teach next semester’s Arctic Studies course on ‘The Arctic in the Age of Globalization’.

In February, Arctic Studies was visited by Morten Larsen from NUKIGA, who talked very enthusiastically about entrepreneurship in Greenland. The week after, students and teachers from CIRCLA were invited to a guest lecture with Albina Pashkevich (Dalarna University) about Indigenous/Tourist relations in Siberia and Across the Arctic. The evening ended with networking and a nice dinner in Aalborg. In the fall, AS students

also went on excursion to the Greenlandic House in Aalborg. Thank you to Bo and Marianne for the warm welcome – and to Arctic Consensus for its excellent contribution!

Other visits this year included former Tourism MA student Liz Cooper from Visit Greenland, now industrial PhD at CBS. She presented Covid-19 challenges and impacts on Greenlandic to tourism students in Copenhagen. Christian Wennecke from Innovation Greenland also came to visit CIRCLA and invited all interested researchers to visit the newly opened Innovation Center in Nuuk.

CIRCLA projects

On the project front, the ARCTISEN – developing culturally sensitive tourism in the Arctic – has entered its last stage. The online learning platform and digital tools developed in the work package headed by AAU are currently being tested and will be released in early spring. They have materialized with the help of Elsbeth Bembom, who undertook an internship with ARCTISEN as part of her 9th semester on the Tourism Master’s programme. Elsbeth will continue working as a student assistant to organize online benchmark sessions for the entrepreneurs and destinations in ARCTISEN.

The Horizon 2020-project FACE-IT kicked off in November. The project has a focus on the future of Arctic coastal ecosystems and identifies transitions in fjord systems and adjacent coastal areas. The project has 14 partners from eight countries. The team from AAU consists of Laura James, Lill Rastad Bjørst and Naja Carina Steenholdt.

An interesting new collaboration this year was the application work done by Mette Abildgaard Simonsen and Carina Ren together with the Connectivity research group headed by Petar Popovski at the Department of Electronic Systems, AAU. The collaboration, funded by a 6-month grant, aimed to explore collaboration around our long-standing research interest in Arctic connectivity, and it has resulted in a forthcoming article on frugal Arctic connectivity as well as a joint application to the Research Council. So keep your fingers crossed and stay posted!

CIRCLA and friends

Ulrik’s exit and Roberts reentry means that the core group of CIRCLA is now comprised of four senior members: Head of Research Lill Rastad Bjørst and Associate Professors Robert C. Thomsen, Carina Ren and Mette Abildgaard Simonsen. As many will know, however, we are thrilled to be surrounded and supported by many close colleagues, working with Artic matters ‘on the side’ of their core research. One of them is Julia Zhukova Klausen, who is working on a contribution to the forthcoming volume Greenland in Arctic Security: entangled (de)securitization dynamics under climatic thaw and geopolitical freeze. Jesper W. Zeuthen, Patrick Andersson and Lill contribute to the volume as well. As part of her Arctic research, Julia also lectured at Sønderborg Open University on the topic of Samarbejde og Securitisering i Danske-Russiske Arktis Forhold: Medie, politiske og offentlige debatter omkring overlappende territoriale krav i Arktis.

During the winter season for muskox hunting, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen traveled to the Kangerlussuaq area in early February to carry out ethnographic fieldwork as part of the DFF-funded research project Muskox Pathways. Resources and Ecologies in Greenland. The project explores the social and economic relations between humans and muskoxen in Greenland in a long-term perspective. In Kangerlussuaq, Astrid explored the multiple (social, economic, political) ways and practices through which the muskox becomes a resource, and how, in turn, the muskox sustains relations and livelihoods in that place. Winter fieldwork was followed up by a summer visit, in which Astrid was accompanied by her colleague, archaeologist Jens Fog Jensen.

In September, Helene Pristed Nielsen published results from the research project ’Equality in Isolated Labour Markets’, which focuses on people living and working in geographically isolated areas of the Nordic region. The project explores how local residents make a living and maintain ties to locality, and how questions of gender equality influence work and family life decisions. The places in focus are Narsaq in Greenland, Suðuroy in the Faroe Islands and Læsø in Denmark The project was carried out in cooperation with Erika Anne Hayfield from the University of the Faroe Islands and Steven Arnfjord from Ilisimatusarfik.

From Rikke Becker Jacobsen, the big news is that the Centre for Blue Governance (Dept. of Planning) is leading a work package in a new 4-year Horizon 2020 project called EcoTip. The project is headed by DTU Aqua and has partners from more than 15 institutions across Europe, North America and Japan. The goal is to identify and predict how Arctic marine ecosystems are changing due to climate change and how it impacts Greenland’s fisheries and the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon. Learn more at: https://ecotip-arctic.eu/.

What next?

CIRCLA has collaborated with the interdisciplinary research platform AAU Arctic since its establishment. A result of this collaboration was the launch in September of the book Collaborative Methods in Arctic Research. Experiences from Greenland, edited by Carina Ren together with Anne Merrild Hansen. Contributors from CIRCLA were Naja Graugaard, Robert C. Thomsen, Daniela Chimirri, and Verena G. Huppert. By the end of 2020, Anne is stepping down as chair of AAU Arctic, leaving Carina to replace her. Rikke Becker Jacobsen replaces Carina as Platform Coordinator.

For 2021, two PhD hand-ins are in the pipeline. In June Naja Carina Steenholdt held a successful pre-defense in June, and she is submitting her dissertation entitled “Subjective Well-being and Quality of Life in Greenland” on December 31, 2020. If all goes well, her defense is planned to be in Nuuk in the beginning of March 2021. Daniela Chimirri also held a fruitful pre-defense for her thesis Studying Tourism through Collaboration in Greenland. A social practice approach. Her hand-in is expected early next year. After the New Year, Patrik Andersson will be back from paternity leave to have his pre-defense of the thesis on why China engages in Arctic mining.

As a X-mas surprise Lill Rastad Bjørst was selected to be part of the Fulbright Arctic Initiative III. The grant will be used for a Fulbright exchange to the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College and fieldwork in Alaska sometime within the next 18 months.

In conclusion, 2020 (really) turned out differently than expected. Still, the above account shows that CIRCLA is not easily stymied, even under lockdown, and that this small but dynamic group is able to keep many balls in the air at the same time.

With season’s greetings and thanks to all contributors and collaborators, we look forward to returning in 2021…!