Call for Submissions: Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North Part IV

Scroll this

Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North – Part IV

Theme: Arctic Extraction

Proposal Deadline: August 30th 2024
Series Publication: October & November 2024

In Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series, Isabelle Gapp is joined by guest editor Jonathan Peyton to explore the visual cultures of Arctic extraction. Building on our two-part session on the same theme at the World Environmental History Congress in Oulu later in August, we wanted to expand this discussion to a wider network of researchers to more broadly think through what stories have been told about extractive Arctic environments in the history of visual culture.

During the nineteenth century, the common narrative of Arctic environments was one untouched by humans, a time typified by Anglophone polar exploration of “barren” and “unknown” lands and waters. It was a time of capital expansion, where global “time-space compressions” encouraged Arctic explorations for exploitation, transportation, and scientific knowledge.

In this series we are inviting submissions of 500-1000 words interested in how the transformation, modification, extraction, and destruction of northern circumpolar and Arctic environments has been documented within art and visual culture. Focusing on Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and makers, our ongoing aim is to bring art history and visual culture studies into the larger conversation of environmental history, and vice versa. Painting, photography, film, and printmaking, alongside the huge diversity of Indigenous artistic media, all offer the means through which to engage with historic concerns of Arctic extraction. With this, we are also mindful of Stephanie Rutherford’s injunction to not read Indigenous histories, cultures, or knowledges extractively.

Foregrounding interdisciplinary perspectives, we welcome contributions from art historians, visual and material culture historians, geographers, environmental historians, and others, whose research encompasses the North American Arctic, Greenland, the Nordic Countries, or Russia, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous communities around the Circumpolar North. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • deforestation
  • hunting and fishing
  • whaling
  • the fur trade industry
  • mining
  • oil and gas industries
  • military installations and technologies
  • geopolitical conflicts
  • scientific expeditions
  • ethnographic fieldwork

Submissions are not limited to these themes but should maintain a visual focus. This might take the form of research posts, photo essays, or personal reflections. 

Proposals of 150 words will be accepted until August 30th with publications running from the start of October through to the end of November.

If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email your proposal and a short bio to Isabelle Gapp at isabelle.gapp@abdn.ac.uk. Please also feel free to write to Isabelle if you would like any additional information or have any questions.

Featured image: Emma Stibbon, Collapsed Whaling Station (2007), woodcut from two blocks printed on Japanese paper using oil-based ink, 117 x 238cm. Royal Academy of Arts. Public Domain.

The following two tabs change content below.

Isabelle Gapp

Isabelle Gapp is an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Her research and teaching considers the intersections between nineteenth and twentieth century landscape painting, gender, environmental history, and climate change across the Circumpolar North.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.