Final conferences of BOREAS EUROCORES gathers more than 120 top scientists to Rovaniemi
12.10.2009 14:00
The two final conferences of international research programme BOREAS EUROCORES are held at the Arctic Centre at the end of October.
The first conference discusses especially how states in the North have influenced settlement patterns in their remote peripheries and how northern residents respond to state regulation measures. Challenging the image of a static Arctic, the second of the conferences explores the relations between humans and different environments, focusing on the importance of movements and narratives.
North presents human behavior
The circumpolar North is widely seen as an ’early warning system’ for global change on the whole planet. While this is recognized for the natural sciences and climate change research, the BOREAS final conference will explore what human lived experience in the North can teach us about general principles of social and cultural change.
- The final conferences of the BOREAS program aims to bring the North more on the global academic map. While there has been a lot of intra-northern cooperation, particularly in the framework of the international polar year (IPY), these conferences bring that voice from the North out to the rest of the world, says senior researcher and leader of the BOREAS MOVE INNOCOME project Florian Stammler from the Arctic Centre. In doing so, the conferences build up academic dialogue among regions of our planet that are considered ’peripheral’ from the point of view of dominant national capitals.
For example, theory of human displacement and how people react to relocation is a topic that is relevant everywhere from Arctic Russia to Tierra del Fuego and from the Australian outback to the Inner Mongolian desert. Prominent southern scholars from Australia, South Africa, South America, India and other countries get acquainted with northern research at the conference.
- We hope that the dialogue will be a mutually fruitful process, so that insights from the South will also contribute to our understanding of the principles of human behavior in the North, says Stammler. The choice of the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi as a venue of the final conferences is strategic: We aim to be a strong academic voice FROM the North reaching out to other regions of our planet.
BOREAS research program
The conferences sponsored by the European Science foundation (ESF) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) are the final events of the 4 year BOREAS programme as part of the ESF EUROCORES funding scheme. The BOREAS programme was the first circumpolar initiative in the humanities, with innovative collaboration between Europe, the US, Canada and Russia, that brought together 40 research projects funded by eight National Funding Agencies with a research budget of millions of Euros.
The core focus of the programme is on time, space, change and movement. The BOREAS programme projects analyse a broad range of topics, among others how seasonality and climate change relate to the high level of human and animal movement and create highly integrated zones of contacts. BOREAS projects explore local perceptions of environmental, cultural, social and economic change, thereby facilitating dialogue between local and scientific models.
More information about the BOREAS programme and the conference programme can be found from the Arctic Centre’s and ESF’s webpages:
http://www.arcticcentre.org/boreasconf and www.esf.org
Participation to the conference is free. The lunches are at own cost. More information and registrations to the conference by email to Elena Nuykina (elena.nuykina@ulapland.fi).
Press conference of the BOREAS final conferences will be held on Thursday 29th October at 10.00 in the Auditorium at the Arktikum house, Rovaniemi. Besides the organizers, at the press conference you can also meet the representatives of the sponsoring foundations, ESF and NSF.
More information:
Senior researcher Florian Stammler from the Arctic Centre, email: florian.stammler@ulapland.fi, p. +358 (0)40 013 8807.
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