2025

• Working with reindeer herders and a group of American scientists to assess the combined impacts of extractive industries and climate change on reindeer herding as a livelihood in Finnish Lapland.
  • Joint fieldwork and methods for co-creating knowledge and the challenges of navigating between our desire to support reindeer herders and still not risking reputation as serious scientists in the eyes of companies. Background info.
• Launching a new project on grassroots green energy solutions (funded by Nordic Council of Ministers) in South Greenland, northern Norway and Lapland.
  • documenting success stories of energy self-sufficiency / independence from fossil fuel in small remote communities. This is extractive industries to the extent that these families seek to extract energy from sun, water and wind in their attempt to become independent from more traditional extractive industries. Funding from NAPA https://napa.gl/en/arctic-cooperation-programme/ (2025-2028, for Arctic Centre Ulapland, UiT Norway and Kujataa Greenland).
• Extractive Industries and Local People, University of Lapland, Masters course
• The Fence That Doesn’t Hold: Reindeer, Urbanisation, and Everyday Tensions in Hammerfest

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The Thematic Network started with a Pan-Arctic Extractive Industries PhD programme in the Social Sciences related to extractive industries. This was (one of or THE?) UArctic’s first concerted PhD programme that awarded a certificate by UArctic as an addendum to PhD students’ degrees. The programme ran from 2011-2018. The courses were all over the Arctic, in North America as well as Greenland, Fennoscandia and Russia, and gave students the additional comparative insights that are often missing when they study at just one University. Thanks to our generous funding in two projects by SIU from Norway, (project numbers HNP-2014-10042, and _NNA-2012-10152), headed by Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv from UiT, we were able to fund massive PhD student mobility in this programme for many years. This led to a total of more than 100 participants in this programme.

The format was that a limited number of PhD students from partner universities (usually not more than 15) met intensively for a week with world-class specialist Professors to discuss extractive industries social sciences in the Arctic. Courses consisted of a lecture series, and discussion sessions where the PhD students works are analysed together among all course participants. After 2014, the programme was extended by initiative of Aytalina Ivanova (NEFU Yakutsk) to also including field-based components where the participants got familiar with local extractive industries in the places where the courses took place, for example in Neryungri, Mirnyi (Yakutia, Russia), Fairbanks (Alaska) and Kirkenes (Norway). The TN offered two such courses per year, organised by partner institutions within the TN (list of courses, topics and experts on the PhD programme’s archived website (arcticextractiveindustries.wordpress.com). PhD students that attended three of these courses and completing the required assignments could get a certificate issued by UArctic that certifies their expertise in Arctic Extractive Industries research and that they can use as an addendum to their PhD degree.

Information about the PhD programme that this Thematic Network on Arctic Extractive Industries hosted until 2018 is archived here. 

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