Reports from Arcum strategic funding grantees

As part of the goal to strengthen Arctic research at Umeå University, Arcum grants strategic funds to applicants to enable travel, workshops, publications, conference participation and invitation of guest researchers. A call for applications is done once per term. Below you find a mix of reports from the different activites which Arcum's strategic funds have helped to make possible.

Marco Eimermann, research assistant at the Department of Geography, reports on an Arctic seminar and a conference

Kristina Svels was invited to give a presentation as part of ARCUM’s seminar series in March 2018. At that time, she was a researcher at the Nordland Research Institute in Bodö, Northern Norway. She talked about Arctic tourism research from a North-Norwegian perspective. Her presentation showed a movie in which entrepreneurship in tourism was related with globalization and technological advances. She further related this with climate change and cruise ship tourism. She mentioned the newly started Nordic Cruise Research Network and answered questions from the audience.

The “lifestyle migration hub meeting” in Umeå (November 2019) was one of the biggest gatherings of lifestyle migration researchers. Over 40 senior and junior researchers from Europe, Canada and Mexico participated in this two-day conference. The group of presenters was an exciting mix of participants who were new to the network and those who have been members for many years. The meeting consisted of an evening-talk, 2 keynotes and 26 presentations communicating ongoing research in the disciplines of anthropology, human geography, sociology and similar social sciences.

Krister Stoor, director at Vaartoe, has reported about how he traveled to Greenland on the 10th of August 2017 with help from Arcum's strategic funding

I traveled to Greenland to participate at University of the Arctic Council 15-18 August. As a chair of the Indigenous Issues Committee I was also a part of Toyon (executive committee) who had a pre meeting at Sisimiut 12-14 August.

Greenland is an interesting country, when UArctic council were decided to take place in Nuuk 15-18 August, I had to be there, of course. The council agenda was the regular. As chair of the Indigenous Issues Committee I was part of Toyon, the executive committee of UArctic. Toyon had a pre-meeting in Sisimiut 12-14 August. Besides the meeting we had a number of excursions to learn more about the local society. A lot of the industry is about fishing, Royal Greenland do have a fish plant at the harbor. We visited the inauguration of the Arctic Tech building a facility host a lot of students. From Sisimiut to Nuuk we took the ferry, a 24 hour ride with beautiful weather and nice sceneries both on land and in the ocean. To see a humpback whale dive is very special. especially for a land crab as me. Nuuk, by the way, is a modern town and a nice place to be in, as Sisimiut. The travel home was special too, the fog made our home trip delayed with eight hours and when we arrived Kanggerlussuaq we had to wait another 16 hours. Kanggerlussuaq is the only airport for international flights. With this journey my time for UArctic is over, two periods as chair for the Indigenous cmte has been a way to learn about all network in the Arctic and of course a lot of new knowledge about Greenland.

Daniel Lindmark, Professor at Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and affiliated to Vaartoe, has reported on his participation in a conference in September 2018

The conference, “Ritual Rooms and Sacred Places: Spatial Perspectives on Religion in the North”, was held at Umeå University, 6–7 September 2018. It was arranged by the research network REHN – Religious History of the North, which is jointly moderated by Umeå University and Mid Sweden University. The conference attracted 18 participants from Sweden, Norway and Finland, and 9 papers were presented. The nature as a ritual room was a recurring theme in the contributions. Sami-related issues appeared in two papers, and two others focused on Laestadianism. The conference was clearly multidisciplinary; disciplines of history, religious studies, theology and comparative literature were represented.

The interesting contributions shed light upon different aspects of the conference theme. At the same time, the many theoretical and empirical points of contact created a coherent whole, which in turn motivated a publication based upon the contributions. After the conference, the texts were revised and elaborated, and at a book workshop at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall in June 2019, they were discussed anew.

During the autumn of 2019 the texts will undergo peer review according to the system used by the REHN book series, Studies on the Religious History of the North. The title will be Rituella rum och heliga platser (“Ritual Rooms and Sacred Places”), and the book will be published in the spring of 2020 under the editorship of Daniel Lindmark and Anders Persson.