Stina Aletta Aikio
Stina Aletta Aikio (Guldal Olavi Kirsi Stiinná) is a Deatnu Sámi experimental artist and a doctoral researcher in Social Sciences at the University of Lapland. Their research, which focuses on how colonialism not only affects the past and the present of the Sámi people, but also the possible futures, is funded by the Kone Foundation.
They are also interested in the tensions in societies and questions of justice, as well as relationship between the local environment and looming global threats – including climate change, pollution and consumer culture. They have also worked actively in the Nordic Queer Sámi movement – and the positions of minorities within minorities are close to their heart.
Geoffrey Gowlland
University of Geneva
Geoffrey Gowlland is Researcher at the University of Geneva (Education Sciences). Following the award of his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, he has held research and teaching positions at the University of Oslo (Cultural History Museum), London School of Economics, Brunel University (London), and the University of Zurich. His research and publications draw on field research in China, Taiwan and Switzerland, and address a range of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues, including on craft practices, apprenticeship and ways of learning, Indigenous people and indigeneity in Taiwan, visual anthropology and museum representations of material practices.
Photo: Riikka Vaahtera
Marja Helander
Master of Fine Arts, visual artist and photographer Marja Helander (b.1965) is an internationally recognized and awarded Deatnu Sámi artist who has presented her works in solo and group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Her extensive artistic work include photographs, short movies, video art and illustrations. Her recent video works are playful, exploring the contradiction between the traditional Sámi way of life and the modern society. Her recent short film Birds in the Earth won the Risto Jarva Prize in Tampere Film Festival 2018 and The Kent Monkman Award at ImagineNATIVE Film Festival 2018. It was also part of Sundance Film Festival 2019 short film competition. Helander was awarded the Finland Prize year 2019.
Photo: Lisa Graves for Concordia University, 2023.
Heather Igloliorte
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander from Nunatsiavut, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. There, Heather directs the nation-wide Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership Project (2018-2025). Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects including nationally and internationally touring exhibitions, solo artist and permanent collection exhibits, festivals, and public art installations. Her curatorial work has recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte has served on many advisories, councils and juries. She is the current president of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021.
Tim Ingold
University of Aberdeen
Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.
Sanna Karkulehto
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
University of Oulu, Finland
In her current research, Professor Sanna Karkulehto is focusing on, for example, transdisciplinary gender and violence research, environmental humanities and human–animal studies, and the ethics and politics of reading. Her most recent books include the co-edited Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture (Routledge 2019) and Gender, Violence and Affect (Palgrave, forthcoming in 2020). In this project she is particularly interested in the questions of the Sámi politics of representation.
Sigga-Marja Magga
PhD Sigga-Marja Magga is a researcher of Sámi cultural studies. She is specialized in Sámi handicrafts, duodji with her own duodji production but also in academic studies. Her special interest is connected to the tensions between the institutionalized duodji and the growth of cultural and social polyphony in the Sámi society: how the Sámis react and construct cultural, political and social changes with and through duodji. She studies gákti, the Sámi dress and its meanings and as a tool in cultural and political resistance and how the gákti changes and constructs different kind of realities and meanings in Sámi society.
Mikkal Morottaja
Mikkal Morottaja, known as Amoc, is the first rap artist to rap in Inari Sámi. Amoc started rapping in the late ’90s. His debut album Amok-kaččâm (Amok run) was released in 2007 on the Sámi National Day. In his music, he deals with global issues and faults as well as the human mind and its problems often veiled behind the stories and metaphors. Often, the songs are mood-focused punchline-styled lyrical works of art with background music, flow, and technically thought-out lyrics are creating musical entities. Amoc is an acronym for Aanaar Master of Ceremony (Master of Ceremony of Inari).
Ulf Mörkenstam
Stockholm University
Ulf Mörkenstam is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University and at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm. His main research interests are within democratic and political theory with a specific focus on the rights of indigenous peoples. He has published frequently on Sámi politics in Sweden and the Nordic countries, and recent publications have appeared in Citizenship Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Electoral Studies and the International Journal of Human Rights.
Ailu Valle
Ailu Valle is a rap artist from Anár, Finnish side of Sápmi, who raps in Northern Sámi, Finnish and English. He has released three solo albums in Northern Sámi, ”Dušši dušše duššat” (2012), ”7” (2015) and ”Viidon sieiddit” (2019). Valle won the Finnish State Culture Prize in 2019, granted by Taike.
Marzia Varutti
University of Oslo
Marzia Varutti is a museologist and cultural historian currently based at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores the intersections between museums, emotions and ecology. Dr Varutti has written on a broad range of topics, including the politics of cultural representation in museums (in Norway, UK, Taiwan, and China among other).
Her more recent research focuses on the emotions we experience in response to the ecological crisis and how these emotions are conveyed and expressed in a range of contexts, including museums; ritualized practices such as ecological mourning ceremonies; and literary endeavours such as ecopoetry.
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