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Paper short abstract:

I discuss how contemporary U.S. travel writing consumes the seasonal landscapes of the Arctic and brands the Arctic. Based on National Geographic travel columns and official narratives from four U.S. Arctic National Parks and Monuments, I highlight the part travel writing plays in presenting the Arctic regions as globalized spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary travel writing tends to compress the wilderness of Arctic environments and the cultural connotations of "the place beyond" (Hastrup, 2007) into a geographic signifier that encourages tourists and outdoor enthusiasts around the globe to envisage a shared Arctic space. In the context of tourism's branding of Arctic landscapes and global warming, the imagery of the Arctic in travel writing is no longer a monotonous, timeless, and barren frontier but rather a globalized space with seasonal variations, colorful landscapes, and cultural history. While the consumption of different seasonal landscapes and their corresponding outdoor activities and expeditions in this new Arctic narrative retains some of the traits of earlier imperial/colonial heroic narratives, its writing about a community of life for diverse Arctic environments, recreation, inhabitants, and visitors challenges traditional Arctic narratives, anthropocentric ideas, and the declensionist narratives of climate change. In this paper, I examine the travel columns of National Geographic and the official narratives of four U.S. Arctic National Parks and Monuments, highlighting the role of travel writing in shaping the Arctic as a globalized space and deconstructing anthropocentric narratives.

Works cited:

Hastrup, K. (2007). Ultima Thule: Anthropology and the Call of the Unknown. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(4), 789–804.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the pictorial and textual descriptions of summer in English-language travel narratives about Greenland in the long nineteenth century showing how text and image often contradicted each other.

Paper long abstract:

Numerous accounts of Arctic exploration were published in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914), often including descriptions of summer and seasonality that somehow became lost in large-scale media coverage of Arctic exploration, which tended to focus on more masculine and challenging Arctic environment in winter. Even today, the Arctic Is strongly associated with winter and difficulty. Heidi Hansson shows that the ‘cluster of associations surrounding the popular idea’ of the Arctic ‘includes severe cold, distance from civilisation, dangerous conditions, barrenness and exposure to natural forces’. She goes on to note: ‘winter is the reference point even in works set in summer’ for the ‘(generalized) North’ that is ‘defined through climate and season’ (2009, 61).

This paper examines the pictorial and textual descriptions of summer in Greenland in the long nineteenth century showing how text and image often contradicted each other. While paragraphs could describe verdant valleys on the west coast, published pictures showed fjords choked with icebergs. This paper analyses references to summer in published travel narratives created by ‘explorers’, and also looks at sketches, paintings, and photographs, as well as articles, engravings and lithographs in periodicals, asking if the visual preoccupation with ice and snow can account for the misconception, prevalent today, that Arctic regions are continuously snow-clad.

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Paper short abstract:

Promised a timeless land of the ‘midnight sun’, physiologists in the twentieth century believed that the Arctic landscape was the perfect ‘laboratory’ for studying circadian rhythms. However, the dynamic nature of the seasonal photoenvironment threatened to upset the results of their studies.

Paper long abstract:

In the mid-twentieth century, physiologists studying circadian rhythms were attracted to the supposed timelessness of the Arctic for their experiments. As a 1971 article in World Medicine declared, ‘The Arctic has a silence and a timelessness that makes it as near perfect an environment … for studying the interacting, intrinsic rhythms that form the cycles of life’. Aiming to uncover the ‘fourth dimension’ of health, scientists sought to isolate experimental subjects from environmental stimuli like light, temperature, and humidity. Promised an unchanging land of the ‘midnight sun’, scientists like Mary Lobban and Nathaniel Kleitman believed that the Arctic landscape was the perfect ‘laboratory’ for rhythms science. However, the dynamic nature of the seasonal photoenvironment threatened to upset the results of their studies.

This paper will explore the clash between the myth of Arctic timelessness and scientific research into human circadian rhythms in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It brings together the history of science and environmental history to explore the use of the Arctic landscape as a laboratory for rhythms science. It will argue that cultural discourses about a ‘timeless’ Arctic environment pervaded the scientific community. It will track the development of several key rhythms experiments and the ways in which the scientists struggled with the variability of the Arctic photoenvironment. As Nathaniel Kleitman bemoaned following his own stay in Tromsø, the conditions ‘fell short of expectations.’ Ultimately, these frustrations did little to dissuade physiologists that Arctic spaces represented an ideal ‘laboratory’ for the study of rhythms.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on people’s everyday adaptation to Arctic seasonality, the solutions they have developed over time to accommodate their daily routines with weather, and the possibilities provided by socio-technological advances. Adaptation to weather will need to continue as the climate heats up.

Paper long abstract:

In the Arctic, snow and ice structure people’s everyday life for half of the year. In the other half, snow melt and rapid plant growth evoke a frenzy of outdoor activities. Modern technology eases up the hardships that previous generations had to experience in winter, when livelihoods were mainly based on manual labour in agriculture, forestry and reindeer herding. But exposure to harsh weather and the need to deal with accumulating snow and ice, slippery conditions and floods during periods of melt cannot be entirely avoided. Residents of Northern Finland practice routines that allow them to move despite or because of winter weather, turning the limiting feature into an enabling one. Ice roads along or across rivers and swamps allowed for faster mobility then in summer, especially when motorized travel was restricted to dry summer weather, to mention one example.

From a socio-historical perspective, this paper will look at people’s adaptation to Arctic seasonality, the solutions they have developed over time to accommodate their daily routines with weather, and the possibilities provided by socio-technological advances. The emphasis will lie on adaptation to weather as an everyday practice against the background of high awareness how practices will need to continue to adapt as the climate heats up.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines several Icelandic music videos and the use of nature and human bodies in them which both recalls the nineteenth century nationalist portrayal of Icelandic nature and at the same time evokes the global climate crisis, a harkening back to the past as well as a future prophecy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the connections between the human body and Icelandic nature in the music videos of several Icelandic artists, including Björk, KALEO, and Of Monsters and Men (OMAM). While the musical styles of these artists are different, all of them create videos depicting bodies integrated into a landscape or nature (Thisted and Gremaud, eds, 2020). Through this trope, both the themes of environmental crisis and danger-- the disappearance of the landscape and the destruction of the body--are shown, as well as a more hopeful theme of harmonious union between people and nature. This portrayal reminds us of nationalistic portrayals of Icelandic nature in nineteenth century paintings with the merging of Icelandic landscapes and bodies (in the work of both foreign and Icelandic artists, such as W. G. Collingwood and Þórarinn Þorláksson), but with the additional aspect of endangered nature/body. By using Icelandic nature as representative of the globe, the island can seen as subject to the same changes as any other region, while at the same time iconic features of the Icelandic landscape are used to call attention to disaster.

Reference: Denmark and the New North Atlantic: Narratives and Memories in a Former Empire, ed Kirsten Thisted and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2020).

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Paper short abstract:

Christoph Ransmayrs novel "The terror of ice and darkness" (1984) depicts seasonality and environmental change through the narration about two polar voyages, a historic and a fictional one. Both illustrate scientific and socio-cultural elements of Arctic seasons in the 19.th and 20.th century.

Paper long abstract:

In Ransmayrs "The terror of ice and darkness", seasons are illustrated through the narration about the historic Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition from 1872-84. The leading polar researchers, Karl Weyprecht and Julius Payer, were attempting to establish a new route connecting the North Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, but their ship became trapped in the closing sea ice. During three years, the mariners experience the seasonal changes between melting ice in all day sunlit summers and growing ice sheets in cold and dark winters.

So on the one hand seasonality is explicitly narrated through a scientific lens, also by looking at concepts of deep time and geological transformations of the earth. On the other hand the novel addresses seasonality in a socio-cultural sense, too. In a retrospective manner, it demonstrates the collective effort of humanity to pass the arctic ice sea since the beginning of the north pole exploration. Next to the real Payer-Weyprecht-expedition, Ransmayr creates a fictional descendant from one of the seamen, the writer Joseph Mazzini. He travels on a steamship, crossing the Arctic sea for scientific reasons, to Spitzbergen, but in the end, he suddenly vanishes in the endless desert of the North Pole. With this genealogical brake, the novel contributes to questions about disruptions of timescales and at the same time provides a self-reflective access to literature. When the novel was published, the concept of the so called ‘Anthropocene’ was not inaugurated yet, but the story exposes various examples of an anthropogenic impact on the Arctic landscape.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with contemporary photographic representations of a changing Arctic. It discusses an archive-based photo project about glaciers on Svalbard by the Swedish photo historian and photographer Tyrone Martinsson.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores an ongoing photo project by the Swedish photo historian and photographer Tyrone Martinsson (b. 1967) about Svalbard’s glaciers.

As part of his research on early Arctic photography and polar expeditions, Martinsson collects historical prints and photos of glaciers on Svalbard from archives. Together with a glaciologist, he identifies the exact vantage points of the images in order to take a new photo according to the composition of the original. Martinsson then arranges the historical representations and his rephotographs of each glacier in horizontal timelines.

This juxtaposition reveals long-term patterns of change in the Arctic landscape. Martinsson’s timelines undermine the traditional notion of the polar region as an area of perpetual ice, as glacial retreat becomes visible. Furthermore, it shows how our views of the North have changed over the centuries.

It should be noted that while the location of the historical image can be determined, the exact time it was taken cannot. Therefore, seasonal variations or natural dynamics, such as surging glaciers, may affect the visual impression. However, since glacial retreat only becomes noticeable for the human eye after several decades, Martinsson’s media collage with long gaps between the images offers a suitable way to visualize these slow dynamics.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the Norwegian documentary films North of the Sun (2012) and Bear Island (2014) by Inge Wegge deploy the historical imaginary of the Arctic, and how the topos of the polar hero is impacted by themes of seasonality, climate change and environmental crisis.

Paper long abstract:

The topos of the polar hero (and Arctic experience as a part of national pride) has a long tradition in Norway. In my paper, I examine how this history of representation is instrumentalised and subverted in the award-winning documentary films Nordfor Sola (North of the Sun, Norway 2012) and Bjørn øya (Bear Island, Norway 2014) by Inge Wegge. I will investigate how the films deploy the historical imaginary of the Arctic, and how the function of the polar hero is impacted by themes of seasonality, climate change and environmental crisis. What contradictions arise from traditional stereotypes of Arctic adventure and an environmentally conscious view of the changeable and changing Arctic? What potential for reflection do these contradictions offer, and to what extent does the topos of the polar hero continue to serve as a popular ideal in evoking environmentally conscious behaviour? Do representations of changing seasons and of a dynamic Arctic landscape have the potential to change our imagination of Arctic adventures and heroism?

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Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the Swedish painter Anna Boberg’s early 20th c. multicolour depictions of the Arctic. Along with other artists, she challenged the dominant narratives of Arctic nature as unspoilt perpetual winter, which still dominates current depictions of the climate crisis.

Paper long abstract:

With floating icebergs in the unpopulated distance, both historical visualisations of the Arctic and current depictions of the climate crisis constantly fall prey to an illusion of neutral illustrations. This illusion persists stubbornly persisting despite the inconvenient truth that any visual depiction is always a construction and never neutral.

This paper deals with how the Swedish painter Anna Boberg (1864-1935) painted an altogether different picture of the Arctic. Along with other artists, she challenged the dominant 19th and 20th century narrative of depicting an Arctic nature of unspoilt perpetual winter.

Across a period of thirty years, 1901-1934, Boberg spent time each year in the lower Norwegian arctic Lofoten archipelago, depicting its nature, people and fishing industries. Through her hundreds of paintings, it is possible to follow how nature changed with the seasons; from the stormy sea in winter to the colourful green landscapes of summer. Her paintings of the arctic chronicle her time spent in the region throughout the year: fishing, hiking, swimming. It also follows her aesthetic development from turn of the century impressionism when the view from her window was painted in blue and pink, to 1920s modernism with thickly layered paint in brown and dark hues.

Anna Boberg’s work was regularly exhibited in the early twentieth century in European capitals such as Paris and Stockholm, portraying a heterogenic understanding of Arctic nature far removed from the single story of a white and dangerous landscape.