As part of ASEH Environmental History Week 2023, NiCHE and the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at the University of Toronto co-hosted the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North virtual roundtable on April 19, 2023.
Chair(s): Isabelle Gapp & Mark A. Cheetham
Participants:
Andrew Bateman (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Clare Benson (University of Connecticut)
Ivana Dizdar (University of Toronto)
Sarah Pickman (Independent Scholar)
Rowan Red Sky (University of Toronto)
Jonathan Westaway (University of Central Lancashire)
Now approaching the end of its second year, the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North JHI Working Group brings together international researchers at all career stages. We are interested in fostering north-south and east-west dialogues by drawing attention to the cultural, social, and environmental dynamics between Indigenous communities and settler populations across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the Nordic countries, and Russia.
This event brought together contributors to Part I and Part II of the NiCHE series ‘Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North’ and members of the JHI Working Group. Our speakers shared their work on Indigenous, environmental, and settler visual and textual pasts, presents, and futures around the circumpolar north.
As the disparate but also related images and examples in these series’ posts and the working group conversations attest, how we have thought about and conceive of the circumpolar north is an ongoing and intricate visual/textual process. Visual and material cultures seen through archival and auction records, popular and academic publications, museum exhibits, and alongside science, environment, and politics, reveal the complexities of continuing to critically engage with the circumpolar north.
Feature Image: A correct draught of the North Pole and of all the countries hitherto discovered intercepted between the pole and the parallel of 50 degrees. Baldwin Collection of Canadiana, Toronto Public Library.
