Wednesday, June 1, 2016
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum
How can we produce new and better knowledge in and about the Arctic?
I will spend some time sharing with you my own ideas on the issues related to the headlines of my presentation.
In the past few years there has been a movement away from the concept of Traditional Knowledge and work has been done to introduce a better concept, illustrating the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic in a more flexible and understandable way. This will, to my opinion and from my own experience, lead to a smoother way of building collaborations among different ways of knowing, i.e. the Western way of Science and Arctic Indigenous Knowledge.
The inclusion of the insightful knowledge and wisdom that our people have about the environment of the Arctic will not only benefit the scientific research done here, but also the peoples of the Arctic. Let us look into how best we can do that!
This lecture is a keynote presentation of the Arctic Horizons Workshop, Arctic Social Sciences in the 21st Century: Integrating Interdisciplinary Natural/Social Scientific Research for Policy Development.
Lene Kielsen Holm works for the Greenland Climate Research Centre and Climate and Society group, as Research Scientist and Project Leader. Ms. Holm has been involved in several international projects in relation to indigenous perspectives and observations of environmental and climate change. With the Sila-Inuk project, hunters, fishermen, sheep-farmers and others were interviewed about their perception on a changing environment, with special focus on climate change.
Ms. Holm has been a partner in ’SIKU: Knowing Our Ice’, an International Polar Year (IPY) project documenting Inuit sea-ice knowledge and use, and in ‘Polar Bears in Northwest Greenland, an interview survey about catch and climate. She was the Greenlandic coordinator for Siku-Inuit-Hila, an international, interdisciplinary project where hunters from Alaska, Canada and Qaanaaq, together with researchers in multiple fields were brought together in different regions of the Inuit territories to exchange knowledge on sea-ice and the life within it. A book based on this project was published in August 2013, and The Meaning of Ice: People and Sea Ice in Three Arctic Communities won the 2014 William Mills Prize for polar nonfiction.
Co-sponsored by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology; and funded by the National Science Foundation.