25 March 2025 | 13:30 - 15:30 (MDT)
Open Session - HYBRID
Room: UMC Fourth Floor - 425
Organisers: Noor Johnson (University of Colorado Boulder, USA); Kristin Weis (George Mason University, USA); Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon (Sauyaq Solutions, USA); Julio Postigo (Indiana University, USA)
Session Description:
Diverse disciplinary expertise, multiple ways of knowing, and the role of social science, are increasingly recognized as essential to address the challenges and opportunities emerging from dynamic and rapidly changing Arctic systems (Biresseliuglu et al. 2020). Social science brings important theories, methods, and practices and contributes both as a collective “field” of expertise with internal diversity as well as through more broadly transdisciplinary efforts as exemplified by NSF’s “Navigating the New Arctic” initiative and NordForsk’s “Sustainable Development of the Arctic” call. Other shifts in Arctic research, such as growing focus on co-production of knowledge and Indigenous-led research, also engage social science strengths while simultaneously creating the need to reflect on how the field of social science should broadly evolve to address and support these larger changes. Themes to reflect on include Indigenous understandings of social science, power imbalances among and within knowledge systems, and the situatedness of multiple ways of knowing. For this session, we invite abstracts that (re)consider the role of social science in the changing Arctic research landscape, ranging from new frameworks and theoretical approaches, to methods, to case studies. We will invite short contributions from presenters followed by a discussion about the themes and ideas presented.
Reference: Biresselioglu, ME, MH Demir, B Solak, A Kayacan, S Altinci, 2020. Investigating the trends in arctic research: The increasing role of social sciences and humanities, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 729,139027, ISSN 0048-9697, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.139027.