ICASS VII:
Circumpolar Perspectives in Global Dialogue: Social Sciences beyond the International Polar Year

Keynote Speakers at ICASS VII    

Professor Gísli Pálsson

Department of Anthropology

University of Iceland  

Gísli Pálsson is Professor at the University of Iceland and, formerly, at the University of Oslo. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Manchester, England (1982). He is Vice-Chair of RESCUE, an environmental program run by the European Science Foundation. Gísli has written extensively on a variety of issues, including arctic history and exploration, genetic history, biomedicine, the new genetics, biobanks, property rights, language, fishing communities, and environmental discourse. One of his recent articles is “Genomic Anthropology: Coming in From the Cold?” (Current Anthropology 2008). He has done fieldwork in Iceland, the Republic of Cape Verde, and the Canadian Arctic. Gísli is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives; The Textual Life of Savants: Ethnography, Iceland, and the Linguistic Turn; Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse; and Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. His latest book is Anthropology and the New Genetics (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Abstract of Keynote Address: The invention of Homo islandicus

Dr. Igor Krupnik

Arctic Studies Center

Smithsonian Institution

Washington, DC, USA 

Igor Krupnik, Ph.D., is cultural anthropologist and Curator of Arctic and Northern Ethnology collections at the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, USA. He has been coordinator of several projects studying the impacts of climate change, preservation of cultural heritage, and ecological knowledge of Arctic indigenous people, including the international project “SIKU: Sea Ice Knowledge and Use: Documenting Inuit Knowledge of Sea Ice,” under the International Polar Year 2007–2008 program.

Dr. Krupnik has published and edited several books and collections, including three volumes on indigenous observations of Arctic environmental change, “SIKU: Knowing Our Ice” (2010), “The Earth Is Faster Now” (2002/2010) and “Watching Ice and Weather Our Way” (2004).  He was the lead curator for the Smithsonian exhibit “Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely” (2006).  He served on the Joint Committee for the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008 and was instrumental in bringing the socio-cultural and humanities issues, ecological knowledge, and environmental observations of northern indigenous people to the agenda of IPY 2007-2008. In 2009–2011, he served as the lead editor of the major IPY summary volume, “Understanding Earth’s Polar Challenge: International Polar Year 2007–2008” prepared by an international team of over 250 contributors on behalf of the IPY Joint Committee. He has done extensive fieldwork in indigenous communities in Alaska, the Bering Sea region, and along the Russian Arctic coast. 

Abstract of Keynote Address:
Crossing Boundaries: What did we learn in IPY 2007–2008 and who learned it?

Professor Kirsten Hastrup

Department of Anthropology

University of Copenhagen, Denmark 

Kirsten Hastrup is porfessor of anthropology, at the UNiversity of Copenhagen. She is the leader of an ERC-project, Waterworlds, designed at studying the social implications of global climate change across the globe. Her own primary field is in NOrth Greenland. Part of her earlier research concerned Icelandic history and society, and the inertwinement of naturarl an social hisories. She has also worked with human rights, with theatre,a and with the general epistemological oand theoretica foundations of anthropology.

Abstract of Keynote Address:
Scales of Attention: Global Connections and Local Concerns in the Arctic 

Professor Nikolai B. Vakhtin

European University at St. Petersburg

Russian Federation

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nikolay Vakhtin graduated from St. Petersburg State University and received his post-graduate training at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. He specialized in Eskimo-Aleut languages, mostly Yupik, and later in sociolinguistics of Siberian / Arctic languages, and in cultural anthropology of the North.

Vakhtin is author and co-author of over 150 scholarly publications, including 12 books; among them: Native Peoples of the Russian Far North. A Minority Rights Group Report. London, 1992; Eskimo Syntax. St. Petersburg: Evropeiski Dom. 1995 (in Russian); Sirenik Eskimo Language: Data and Analysis. LINCOM-Europa: Munich, 2000; Languages of the Peoples of the North in the 20th Century: Essays on Language Shift. St. Petersburg: Dmitri Bulanin. 2001 (in Russian); Russian Old-Settlers of Siberia: Social and Symbolic Aspects of Identity (with E.Golovko and P. Schweitzer).  Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo. 2004 (in Russian); Commander Island Aleut Language: The Bering Island Dialect. (with E. Golovko and A. Asinovskii). St. Petersburg: Nauka. 2009 (in Russian); a.o.

Vakhtin taught and worked as visiting scholar / professor in many research centers, such as Institute of Eskimology, University of Copenhagen (1989- 1990); American Museum of Natural History, New York (Fulbright Scholar, 1993- 1994); Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, UK (1994-1996 and 2010); Center for Linguistic Typology, Australian National University, Canberra (1999); Georgetown University, Washington D.C. (2001); New Colege, Oxford University, UK (2010);  a.o.

Vakhtin is currently Professor of Arctic Studies at the European University, St. Petersburg. He teaches courses on Sociolinguistics, Linguistics, and Arctic Social Studies.
 

Abstract of Keynote Address: The Future of Arctic Social Research in Russia

Dr. Sven D. Haakanson, Jr.

Executive Director
Alutiiq Museum
Kodiak, Alaska, USA

Born and raised in the rural Kodiak Island community of Old Harbor, Alaska, Sven Haakanson is a member of the Old Harbor Alutiiq Tribe.  He holds a BA in English from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University.

Since 2000, Haakanson has worked to share Native American perspectives with museums and museum practices with Native people as Executive Director of the nationally acclaimed Alutiiq Museum, a Native cultural center in Kodiak, Alaska.  Haakanson has made collections more accessible to Native communities by researching objects in the world’s museums and developing traveling exhibits and educational resources around the information they hold.  In 2007 his work was honored with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Haakanson serves on many cultural organizations and maintains an active research program.  He is systematically documenting Kodiak’s prehistoric petroglyphs and continues to publish his research on the Nenets culture of Siberia.  In addition, he is an accomplished artist, known for his carvings and photography.  Sven is married to Kodiak educator Balika Finley Haakanson. They have two daughters.

Theme of Keynote Address: The revitalization of indigenous language, culture, and customs.