AAU Conference 2021: GREENLAND – DENMARK 1721-2021

In January 2021 Aalborg University is hosting the conference GREENLAND – DENMARK 1721-2021.

As we approach the year 2021, Greenland and Denmark can look back at 300 years of colonization and resistance, continuous cultural encounters and relationship-building, cooperation and conflict. The conference offers itself as a platform for panels presenting and discussing thematic and disciplinary evaluations, as well as on-going projects within the overall theme.

The conference invites panel sessions and papers presenting and discussing analyses from across the human and social sciences. The goal is for panels to result in a series of individual and collective publications. If feasible, select papers will be published in an English language special issue, and a separate selection will be published in a Danish language edited volume.

The conference currently accepts submissions of abstracts of both free standing papers and papers for a number of panels. Read more about the Call for Papers. Please click here to submit your abstract. Deadline for paper abstracts: 17 August 2020.

REXSAC researchers Lill Rastad Bjørst & Dag Avango are convening a panel discussion:

Danmark – Greenland mining (after)lifes and legacies

Extractive industries represent a “new” contact zone in Greenland. Arctic lands have always been spaces of encounters. Studying these encounters reveals how encounters are fundamental to social histories, and according to Ortner (1999) what is at issue with encounters are “the ways in which power and meaning are deployed and negotiated, expressed and transformed” (1999: 17). Tsing (2015) asks us to listening to the “cacophony of troubled stories” (34) related to encounters – as an alternative to the mono-progress-time stories that is often presented and circulated. The arguments is that, stories of these encounters can reveal (and add) interesting insight into the complex industrialization of the Arctic, which engage Arctic studies scholars in these years. This panel will especially focus on the Greenlandic mining (after)lifes and legacies. In Greenland, as in many other places in the Arctic, mining issues center on a democratic imperative to include a variety of voices on the one hand and to facilitate a swift and business friendly environment for mining companies to the benefit of the regional economies. This predicament opens up a multitude of complex negotiations and encounters.

Read more about the conference and the call for papers here.

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