Workshop at the conference of the German Anthropological Association on “Contested Knowledge: Anthropological Perspectives“, 25 – 28 July 2023, Munich

 

Organized by

Roza Laptander, Universität Hamburg
Gertrude Saxinger, University Vienna & Austrian Polar Research Institute APRI

 on behalf of the DGSKA Regional Group Circumpolar Regions and Siberia in collaboration with the CO-CREATE initiative

Wednesday 26.7.23, 2p.m. & 4p.m.
Room: DZ 001
Abstracts

Workshop theme

Research in the Arctic and sub-Arctic is called to change the attitude of scientists towards Indigenous knowledge holders and thus make the relationship with the Indigenous rightsholders equitable. From the beginning of the last century until today, Indigenous peoples of the North have faced growing interest from social/natural scientists conducting research in their homelands. Simultaneously, such interaction carries a bleak legacy of knowledge exploitation in a colonial manner. In the past, research has rarely been brought back to communities and Indigenous rightsholders in a form that could be meaningfully used for facilitating sustainable social change or endorsing local cultural heritage.
Indigenous rights holders expect current research to be about not only climate change, but ongoing contemporary colonialism, resource extraction, and more.
Indigenous communities and organizations as well as international scientific organizations have published a number of policy declarations, codes of conduct, and protocols for ethical and collaborative research. Indigenous scholars and researchers applying decolonial methodologies are increasingly carrying these principles in academia to achieve equitable co-production of knowledge. These
debates are linked to discussions that have taken place elsewhere, especially in the Pacific, Oceania, Australia, and the Americas.
The goal of this workshop is to enable an in-depth conversation about decolonial research methodologies, knowledge co-creation, ethics, and collaborative research practices as well as about the current state of decolonial debates in anthropology.
We invite Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and rightsholders to share their experience and we explicitly invite papers from across the globe for mutual learning. The session is open to hands-on examples from research practice, epistemological reasoning and theory driven methodology discussions.

 

Keynote: Britt Kramvig, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Research in the Arctic and sub-Arctic is called to change the attitude of scientists towards Indigenous knowledge holders and thus make the relationship with the Indigenous rightsholders equitable. From the beginning of the last century until today, Indigenous peoples of the North have faced growing interest from social/natural scientists conducting research in their homelands. Simultaneously, such interaction carries a bleak legacy of knowledge exploitation in a colonial manner. In the past, research has rarely been brought back to communities and Indigenous rightsholders in a form that could be meaningfully used for facilitating sustainable social change or endorsing local cultural heritage.

 

Indigenous rights holders expect current research to be about not only climate change, but ongoing contemporary colonialism, resource extraction, and more. Indigenous communities and organizations as well as international scientific organizations have published a number of policy declarations, codes of conduct, and protocols for ethical and collaborative research. Indigenous scholars and researchers applying decolonial methodologies are increasingly carrying these principles in academia to achieve equitable co-production of knowledge. These debates are linked to discussions that have taken place elsewhere, especially in the Pacific, Oceania, Australia, and the Americas.

 

The goal of this workshop is to enable an in-depth conversation about decolonial research methodologies, knowledge co-creation, ethics, and collaborative research practices as well as about the current state of decolonial debates in anthropology. We invite Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and rightsholders to share their experience and we explicitly invite papers from across the globe for mutual learning. The session is open to hands-on examples from research practice, epistemological reasoning and theory driven methodology discussions.

 

 

Slot 1

 

Britt Kramvig, UiT The Arctic University of Norway:
Facilitating for postcolonial moments in indigenous research

 

Catherine Dussault, University of Laval:
Enlightening knowledge: towards a definition of ”Inuit knowledge’’ in Nunavik-led research

 

Lena Gross, UiT The Arctic University of Norway and NIKU Norgga kulturmuitodutkama instituhttas/The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research:
Ethnographic refusal as a decolonial research methodology

 

Elspeth Ready, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Peter Collings, University of Florida:
Ethnographic methods and research co-development in the Canadian Arctic

 

 

Slot 2

Nina Smedseng, UiT The Arctic University of Norway:
Co-creating knowledge: Relational accountability in Walking-with practices in Sámi (Indigenous) tourism research

 

Tarja Tuula Salmela, UiT The Arctic University of Norway:
The road was never open: crafting decolonial research practices to envision alternative stories of self-drive and route tourism

 

Gertrude Saxinger, University of Vienna:
EU-PolarNet. Co-ordinating and Co-designing the European Polar Research Area

 

Discussion