25 March 2026 | 09:00 - 18:00 CET
Open Session - ON-SITE ONLY
Room: Richard Mortensenstuen
Organiser: Kate Ortenzi (Dalhousie University, Canada)
Session Description:
Data sovereignty affirms the right of Indigenous Peoples to govern the collection, ownership, access, use, stewardship, and sharing of data about their communities, lands, waters, knowledge, and cultures. Across the circumpolar North, researchers across disciplines work with Indigenous data (defined as data about Indigenous Peoples, from Indigenous Peoples, and about Indigenous lands, environment, and resources). Yet, structural, technical, ethical, political, and relational barriers inhibit Indigenous communities’ full exercise of their data sovereignty. These can include differences in cultural values, expectations, colonial‐derived research norms, lack of infrastructure for data storage and stewardship in communities, lack of researcher knowledge about data rights, as well as systems that privilege academic institutions rather than communities in decisions about data use and dissemination.
This workshop hopes to bring together community members from across the Circumpolar North with researchers engaged across scientific fields that collect Indigenous data. It is open to all ASSW participants. The goals of this workshop are four-fold:
- Understand the practical and structural barriers to data sovereignty from the specific and local to the general and institutional.
- Build relationships between those engaged in data sovereignty. Foster mutual understanding around what “good data relations” mean across diverse Arctic contexts. Discuss actions to ensure data collected through research (and the knowledge generated) are meaningfully returned and/or co-controlled/controlled by their Indigenous originators.
- Clarify roles and responsibilities of researchers in upholding good data relations as well as the ethical, legal, and practical obligations they hold (including free, prior, and informed consent; cultural protocols; governance by Indigenous authorities).
- Co-create solutions that are contextually appropriate: policies, practices, infrastructures, protocols, tools, mechanisms, and where possible, action plans that support data sovereignty in Arctic contexts. This work involves understanding and respecting community values around data.