ONLINE EXHIBITION “The Objects: Materiality in Sámi Research”
The online exhibition marks the end of a three-year interdisciplinary research project “The Societal Dimension of Sámi Research” (2017-2020, NFR) which has been hosted by the Arctic University Museum of Norway (UiT).
The exhibition turns our research into objects of an “ethnographic” online museum. In so doing, we gesture towards the historicity and worldliness of research: just like material objects in museums, also academic knowledge reflects the particular time, place, society and academic culture which produced it. For the past three years, we have examined the historicity and materiality of Sámi research: now we place our own work in display.
BOOK LAUNCH: “Sámi Research in Transition: Knowledge, Politics and Social Change”
More than fifty years ago, the social terrain of research on the Sámi was radically transformed. Calls for “new” Sami research, which would be accountable to the Sami society’s own needs rather than to those pertaining to the (colonial) state and the dominant society, became pertinent.
This book examines whether, how and to what extent the perceived turn from the “lappologist” era to the present has changed the politics of knowledge in the Sámi context, with an overarching interest on the entangled relationships between research and social change. The book is edited by project members Dr. Laura Junka-Aikio, Dr. Jukka Nyyssönen and Prof. Veli-Pekka Lehtola, and will be published by Routledge in 2021.
KEYNOTE LECTURE, Prof. Troy Storfjell (Pacific Lutheran University, US).
Professor Troy Storfjell will speak about the development of Sámi research as seen from a perspective in North America. Professor Troy Storfjell is actively involved in the field of critical Indigenous studies in North America, where he led the development of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at his own university, on the traditional lands of the Puyallup and Nisqually peoples. This summer he has completed a three-year term as an elected member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and he is currently involved in several collaborative trans-Indigenous research projects. A Norwegian citizen and Sámi himself, Professor Storfjell works primarily in the areas of Nordic literature, Sámi film, and Indigenous criticism and research methodologies. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2001, and studied at UiT for several years in the early to mid-1990s. Keynote title: “Sámi Research in Global Framework: Perspectives from North America”