Summer Course: Icelandic Field Stations 2023

Announcing: A Unique Summer Course in Integrated Environmental Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences: ICELANDIC FIELD STATIONS 2023

July 29th to August 11th 2023

In Bárðardalur, northern Iceland, and Höfn in Hornafjörður in Southeast Iceland

The Svartárkot Culture-Nature Project in collaboration with The Wright Ingraham Institute offer an interdisciplinary, immersive, place-based course intended for scholars, emerging professionals, researchers, post-graduates, master’s and doctoral students.

The course has been developed at the intersection of the environmental humanities and the natural and social sciences. It connects with local communities and to issues of global importance, with a focus on the scenic Lake Mývatn area, the Bárðardalur valley on the banks of the glacial Skjálfandafljót River, and the Vatnajökull Glacier near Höfn, and concluding in Reykjavik. The course will provide a unique blend of lectures and experiences of cultural histories and contemporary issues embedded in landscapes. It will engage a range of questions concerning the human dimensions of environmental change and the effects of such change on environments and societies, grounded in interdisciplinary orientation to case-based study.

The course will involve multiple excursions and lectures in the field and integrates perspectives, theories, case studies and methodologies from the following disciplines:

Environmental Humanities

Literary Ecocriticism

Cultural Creativity

Environmental and Climate History

Environmental Archaeology and Anthropology

Historical Ecology

Ecosystem Ecology

Population Ecology

Limnology

Natural Resource Use Management

Tourism

Manuscript Studies

Themes/Keywords: Climate change / Icelandic Literature / Energy / Agriculture / Glacial Recession / Water / Arctic / Cultural Heritage / Environmental Humanities / Iceland / Ecology / Landscape studies

All course lectures, readings, discussions and writing will be in English.

The course is co-organised by: Svartárkot Culture-Nature (SCN) Project, Wright-Ingraham Institute, and Hólar University, with co-operation with the Icelandic Museum of Natural History; the City University of New York; the Stefansson Arctic Institute; the Humanities for the Environment (HfE) Circumpolar Observatory; NABO (The North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation); NIES (The Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies); BifrostOnline, and the Circumpolar Networks case of IHOPE (the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth), a core project of Future Earth.

For detailed information and applications, please visit our website https://svartarkot.is/