The Icelandic turf house as skin: archive, anarchy, identity. In Objects in the archives: modern material culture and heritage in the north. Eds. Kristján Mímisson & Davíð Ólafsson. Routledge.
From the Floe Edge Project
The project From the Floe Edge: Visualising Local Sea Ice Change in Kinngait, Nunavut engages with art history, visual studies, scientific analyses, and local knowledge to better understand the relationship between the community and artists in Kinngait with local sea ice change.
A Circumpolar Landscape Publication
A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 was published in April 2024 by Lund Humphries as part of their Northern Lights series. This book demonstrates that Canadian and Scandinavian landscape painting reaches far beyond national identity and a preoccupation with Eurocentrism. This study brings together the work of Emily Carr, the Canadian Group of Seven, Anna Boberg, and Gustaf Fjaestad among others, with each chapter highlighting the high level of interactivity between artists and the environment. Simultaneously, this book highlights the lack of awareness of the respective ecosystems in which many of these works were produced. Working around northern hemispheric latitudinal lines, A Circumpolar Landscape considers how a similar ecology and topography - orientated around the themes of forests, wilderness, lakes, mountains, aurorae, and ice – was depicted and is shared across these northern landscapes.
All Aboard the Nascopie - Publication
"All Aboard the Nascopie: Image-Making, Colonial Modernity, and Coastal Memory in the Canadian Eastern Arctic" was published by the Journal of Canadian Studies in late 2024.
Conference: From Archaeology to Ethnography Subarctic culture in China
Workshop, March 2025: a special event, co-organised by the Anthropology Group and the Arctic Studies Centre of China,
Panel: Ethnohistory of Indigenous Archives and Archiving
Sergei Kan and Dmitry Arzyutov are organizing a panel on the Ethnohistory of Indigenous Archives and Archiving for the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, taking place in San Antonio, October 8–11, 2025.
Publication: Letters from/to the Field and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge
Executive planning meeting to arrange the CAFE conference in June
Conference Paper
Maria Nordvall Inside the circle - outside the frame: Fieldwork
Gro Ween speaking at Memorial University
CAFE member Professor Gro B.Ween (University of Oslo) is speaking at Memorial University in a seminar series that asks speakers to consider interdisciplinarity and collaborative encounters. Ween takes examples from repatriation, exhibition production to encounters with salmon biologists and co-management institutions in Sápmi
COP28: Conversations with Youth
One of the project's members, PhD Researcher and research assistant Maria Nordvall, participated at BEYOND COP28: CONVERSATIONS WITH YOUTH, this spring as the Arctic representative. Professor David Anderson, (UK PI Archeritage) is recognised as a key supporter and friend of the COP28 youth team. The virtual event aimed to review and reflect on COP28, particularly in relation to the 1.5°C goal, the disproportionate impacts of climate change and ensuring that marginalised voices and communities are included in climate change discussions. Nordvall's focus was on raising awareness of green colonialism and how a true green transition cannot be made at the expense of indigenous peoples.
Ethnotopias and Embodied Visions: Reframing Cultural Narratives Through Indigenous Home Photography
This presentation examines the dual capacity of photography as both a tool for othering and a medium for reframing cultural narratives. Drawing on an analysis of home photographs collected among Indigenous communities in Chukotka, Arctic Russia, it highlights how photography, introduced during the 1960s and 1970s modernization efforts, served as a means of documenting Soviet life through institutional portraits and personal snapshots. Indigenous domestic photography, however, provides a unique lens into the social and cultural contexts of these communities, offering alternative narratives to those imposed by Soviet and post-Soviet aesthetics. Using qualitative methods such as photo-elicitation, the research bridges visual and verbal data, emphasizing their interdependence in understanding the ways Indigenous communities perceive and represent their worlds.
This study seeks to uncover distinctive aesthetic elements of Indigenous origin within this photographic tradition and juxtapose them with dominant ethnotopias (Mitchell, 1994) – idealized, externalized visions of the Arctic shaped by anthropologists, reporters, and colonial narratives. By incorporating the concepts of „affectionate knowledge“ (MacDougall, 1998) and „sensuous mimesis“ (Taussig, 1993), the research foregrounds the embodied, sensory experiences embedded in Indigenous photography. It posits that such knowledge, conveyed through the visual medium, challenges the othering gaze by presenting self-representations rooted in emotion, perception, and lived experience. Further supported by Deleuze's „affection-image“ (2004) and Arnheim's „visual thinking“ (1969), this work underscores the integral role of sensory and emotional frameworks in reframing visual narratives.
This presentation advances sensory approaches to the study of postcolonial identities and underscores the importance of Indigenous perspectives in reshaping the visual research landscape and dismantling colonial hegemonies within the Arctic.
