Online Symposium 2021
The Changing Environment of the North:
Cultural Representations and Uses of Water
The Project’s Closing Symposium
August 23–24, 2021
University of Turku
In the age of global climate change and sea pollution, the language of natural sciences, economics, and technology must be complemented with and questioned by interdisciplinary humanist studies, which we need in order to pose questions about the changing environment and its changing meanings. Thus, while the North is in a rapid process of transformation, so are the ways of discussing and representing it. The closing symposium of the consortium The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (CEN) asks what the North and the Arctic look like when we investigate their histories, narratives, languages, and human and non-human lives through water in its multiple transformations, including the Arctic Ocean. The aim of the symposium is to discover and promote the specific value of literary and cultural studies in the discussion of the North and the Arctic. By engaging water with its spatial bodies (seas, rivers, and oceans) and the qualities of ice, snow, and flood as a key means of mapping, the symposium aims at a critical re-thinking of the modernization processes concerning the North, and consequently at recognizing relations that may previously have been ignored in theoretical discussion.
Welcome to the CEN online symposium!