Photo showing Ingeborg Høvik, project manager Arctic Voices.
Photo by Sven Haakanson

Ingeborg Høvik is the project manager of Arctic Voices in Art and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, which in 2020 received four years of funding through the Research Council of Norway’s Young Research Talent Programme. Ingeborg is an Associate Professor in Art History at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Between 2014 and 2017 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research, UiT. She has been a Caird Short-term Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, London (2008), a guest researcher at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (2015), and a visiting researcher at Greenland National Museum and Archives (2015, 2019). Her research focuses on representations of the Arctic in European and Inuit art and visual culture, and her latest publication, co-edited with Dr Sigfrid Kjeldaas, is the double special issue ‘Counter-narratives from the Arctic Contact Zone’, in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Sigfrid Kjeldaas is the Researcher on and co-author of the Arctic Voices Project. Her educational background is in ecology and literature. She received her PhD in literature and culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 2017 with the dissertation Nature Writing as Contact Zone. Her publications focus on the relationality and aesthetics of nature writing and exploration literature about the Arctic. Kjeldaas has been active in the work for gender equality at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she headed the 2016-2018 ‘Career Development Program for Women’ and acted as coordinator for the RCN-funded project Prestige: Gender Balance in Research Leadership at UiT from 2018 to 2019. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at GenØk – Centre for biosafety affiliated with the RCN project ReWrite: New knowledge to navigate the rewriting of human/nature relations through genome editing in the search for sustainable food.

Arctic Voices in Art and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

– a four-year project (2020-2024) funded by the Research Council of Norway's Young Research Talent Programme.

We are a group of international scholars and artists who contribute to the ongoing efforts of decolonizing dominant Arctic History, this project gathers stories that point to those who were on the receiving end of imperialism in the extended nineteenth century. We engage in untold or unpublished histories of colonial encounters between Arctic Indigenous peoples or Arctic animals and agents of empire (European, settler-American or Russian) through analyses of nineteenth-century texts, images and objects originating in cultural and naturalcultural contact zones.

Analysing this material, we apply and develop concepts and methodologies rooted in post- and decolonial theory and research methods, feminist ecocriticism and Indigenous methodologies in order to: 1) expose the illusions of the modern progress narratives (scientific, material, moral) that accompanied colonial ventures in the Arctic region; 2) document the impact Euro-American and Russian imperialism had on human and animal life in the Arctic region; and, 3) foreground the knowledge, creative expressions, experience, resilience and resistance of Arctic Indigenous peoples and communities.

Essential to our approach is the active pursuit and inclusion of Indigenous history, knowledge and perspectives by engaging relevant anthropological and Indigenous research, knowledge holders and communities in the process and output.