Northern studies

Early academic article on McCartney's songs during/after the Beatles. This focuses on themes of time and nostalgia alongside musical innovation in a selection of McCartney songs, 1963-2001. Some of my later publications on McCartney (and Lennon) are also available on my academia.edu page.

With close reference to Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), this chapter emphasises the influence of working-class culture on the songwriting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The chapter also discusses Hoggart's rarely-cited (and often cautious) comments on The Beatles' work. (This chapter was published in the edited collection Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique, edited by Michael Bailey and Mary Eagleton (Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, Nottingham UK, 2011).

The long history of travels to the northernmost areas of the globe has been accompanied by an equally long tradition of textual representations of the North. Such representations span not only variations in geography but also a whole range of genres and scientific disciplines. This volume provides a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary investigation into some of the natural and cultural phenomena described in northern travel writing and documentary literature. The different chapters demonstrate how the images of the North have been shifting; the North has been conceived of as an uncivilised and dangerous space, but also as an idyllic, fascinating, and even politically paradigmatic region. Topics concerning natural phenomena, economic activities and infrastructure in the North are also addressed.
The book was edited by Silje Gaupseth, Marie-Theres Federhofer and Per Pippin Aspaas. The three editors are all members of the interdisciplinary research group Narrating the High North, based at the University of Tromsø, Norway. In 2011, this group hosted a symposium on “Travels in the North” in cooperation with the Centre franco-norvégien en sciences sociales et humaines of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. This volume is based on the papers that were presented at the symposium.
The attached PDF contains the Table of Contents and Foreword of the book.

The development of populated spaces in Modern Japan into distinct places by government and private actors has been the target of much recent scholarship, particularly concerning the development of urban identities in major cities. However, it has thus far been more limited regarding the mechanics of identity formation in Japan’s colonies, particularly with regard to the settler colony of Karafuto. This paper considers the colonial government’s development of a distinct ‘Karafuto’ identity, which it associated with a supposed 'historical' connection to the land as well as to the Imperial System as the northern guardians of Japan. This paper analyzes the narratives of identity produced in the official local history, which were then disseminated through both a local magazine and the local museum. By looking at these sources, one can see that the same processes and engagement between local government and private actors that were taking place on the mainland were also being implemented in Karafuto. As these processes occurred even in the absence of a pre-existing history or sense of community, they provide an alternative perspective of place and identity formation in Japan. From this, further speculation on the relationship between elite attempts at fostering local identity and local relations to these policies in early 20th Century Japan can potentially be drawn.

Traces a shift over the past century of Alaskan writing away from elegiac or apocalyptic representations of environmental change, toward more nuanced, post-nature perspectives. Rather than mourning ‘the end’ of northern nature, recent texts such as Seth Kantner’s novel Ordinary Wolves take phenomena like fossil fuel culture and climate change as opportunities to assert the resilience of rural and indigenous lifeways in a changing north. More important, these texts draw simultaneously on poststructuralist and premodern indigenous intellectual traditions, indicating that contemporary Alaskan literature can help decolonize the environmental humanities by foregrounding points of ecophilosophical convergence between academics and rural / indigenous communities.

“Writing in the Anthropocene from the Global North to the Global South: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Richard Power’s The Echo Maker” has already been accepted for publication in the forthcoming collection Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory, edited by Kevin Maier and Sarah Jaquette Ray, which will be published by University of Alaska Press. In this chapter, I argue that by juxtaposing Shelley’s prescient Frankenstein (1818) with Richard Power’s US novel, The Echo Maker (2006) the reader can see how literary texts, both old and new, and, more specifically, American studies, are contributing to growing awareness of the Global North’s long term/large scale human impact on the planet.

The paper suggests that cultural landscapes were permeated by religious meanings in all pre-modern societies, including Sami societies before c. AD 1600. We suggest that knowledge of this sacred landscape was not restricted to an elite or to shamans, but was ...

Подмеченное Герценом вятское обыкновение ездить «гусем» (несколько необычное для жителя центральной России) связано с тем, что дороги в Вятском крае слишком часто бывали узки, неудобны и малопроезжи. Эта запряжка роднила Вятку с Сибирью, где этот давний, традиционный для России способ запрягания лошадей также сохранялся с допетровских ещё времён.

The article deals with the «Northern discourse» (the term by
E. Sh. Galimova) in the Russian rock-poetry of the last 10-15 years. Though the
music styles the authors belong to, their aesthetic preferencea and world views
can differ, the comprehension of North (Northern Russia: Scandinavia or the
allegoric or fantastic North) always turns to be strikingly similar: it is perceived
as an ideal dimension of the world, probably connected with divinity.

The creation, by federal letters patent, of The University of Canada North (UCN) in March 1971, is an important event in the history of education in the Canadian North. The brain-child of Richard Rohmer, a prominent Toronto lawyer, and some fifty-seven residents of the two northern territories, the UCN initiative was intended to be a grass-roots northern institution responsive to specific northern needs. The idea was good and the motives noble. Yet, practically from its inception, UCN was beset by problems serious enough to first stunt its growth and eventually to suffocate it entirely. Those problems were rooted in philosophical and conceptual differences about the kind of institution the new university and exacerbated by financial and administrative difficulties.

This paper concerns Kisima Ingitchuna / Never Alone, an Iñupiat-language video game from the world’s first indigenous-owned game studio. Never Alone confronts, in some playful and provocative ways, the challenges of translating arctic oral culture into digital media. It’s also a premodern posthumanist text: Never Alone depicts a watchful world suffused with independent agencies with whom humans must negotiate strategic partnerships for survival. I end the paper by assessing Never Alone in light of objections that games with environmental justice ambitions should focus on simulating complex nonhuman systems rather than embodied individuals. Because Never Alone’s animist cosmology figures human embodiment as coextensive with such systems, I suggest that Never Alone offers a middle ground in which to think the human and nonhuman together at multiple temporalities and scales. The fact that this vision emerges not from 21st century theory but from a millennia-old oral tradition reiterates, as Zakiyyah Jackson has argued in a different context, that perhaps “the “post” human is not a temporal location [at all,] but a geographic one” (“Animal,” 673).

“Settler colonialism” presents a vexing challenge to voting rights theory and praxis in liberal-democratic states. I call this challenge “Kymlicka’s dilemma,” after Will Kymlicka, the political theorist who has led contemporary discourse on “minority nation” rights. As Kymlicka observed, members of a state’s dominant cultural nation, or staatsvolk, may, by exercising universal mobility rights, numerically “swamp,” and then, by using universal voting rights, democratically dominate, an Indigenous minority nation in its homeland. To prevent this, an Indigenous minority nation may seek to exercise group-based voting protections, such as guaranteed representation. Where “Kymlicka’s dilemma” arises – i.e., where minority group-differentiated voting protections challenge the voting powers of individual staatsvolk and vice versa – a constitutional conflict seems certain. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, from at least the 1970s until the separation of Nunavut in 1999, the specter of “Kymlicka’s dilemma” (mis)shaped the constitutional evolution of the territorial government. There, in what was long Canada’s last Indigenous-majority jurisdiction, decades of Indigenous political resistance to settler control hinged on the permissibility of Indigenous overrepresentation in the territorial legislature. In the 1990s, three developments portended changes to Indigenous overrepresentation in that legislature: Charter of Rights-inspired limits on electoral-district malapportionment, constitutional recognition of Indigenous group-based protections, and the amplified danger of settler “swamping” that would result from Nunavut’s separation. As if in a natural experiment, these developments created conditions for a potentially volatile constitutional conflict. This thesis analyzes the results of that experiment. It shows that a constitutional conflict did ensue, catalyzed by the territorial electoral reapportionment of 1998-99. This conflict involved a yearlong political clash over Indigenous versus individual rights. This thesis further shows that a controversial court ruling, and equally controversial political decisions, resolved this conflict, deciding “Kymlicka’s dilemma” by rejecting Indigenous group-differentiated voting protections in the territorial legislature.

Literary and cinematic elegies abound for northern landscapes and lifeways presumed ‘lost’ to modernization.  These narratives are part of a wider elegiac trend representing the North as a place of disappearance, or a place itself disappearing. Such melancholy narratives not only still subtend much of American environmental art, but often shape scholarly discourse on literature and environment. Yet in recent years, a few Alaskan writers are taking a much different attitude toward environmental change. I focus on contemporary voices that are shifting focus from elegizing what is lost to articulating how contemporary northerners, human and non-human, are going on living in the midst of ecosocial emergency.

Since 1964, there have been four periods in which a northern university for the Canadian territories was proposed or attempted. The first, from 1964 to 1982, coincided with such motivating national forces as post-war expansion and renovation of the post-secondary sector with new universities and community colleges, northern development, and land claims. In the second stage, from 1983 to 2000, the territorial governments established Yukon and Arctic colleges, both institutions with some university-like features. During the third, “circumpolar,” period, from 2001 to 2011, the Arctic world opened up and the University of the Arctic network was established. The fourth, “academic,” phase began on October 14, 2014, when the Yukon Government and Yukon College Board of Governors jointly announced the college is developing a degree and a post-graduate certificate for launch in 2017. Northerners and others who have advocated for a northern university may now finally witness the emergence of such an institution, one that will meet the varied needs of residents of the North.

THIS ESSAY DISCUSSES THE INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN art, human imagination and postcolonial critique in the context of northern Finland. The ‘North’ is conceived here as an imaginative
region, a myth, characterized by the stereotypes attached to nature and non-civilization, constructed through various socio-cultural institutions, both in art and science. In the case of Finland, the stereotype of the ‘North’ is a cold, snowy wilderness with reindeer herding Saami people and blazing northern lights. For several centuries, various forms and types of art have functioned in order to mystify, exoticize and legitimize the hegemonic understanding about the ‘North’ as a periphery. However, during recent years several northern artists have started to contest prevailing conceptions and challenge the stereotypes and myths attached to northernness. What follows introduces examples from various forms of northern culture – including literature, design, music, paintings and films – through which the ‘North’ as a myth has been constructed, but also contested.

"This study examines the influence of the wage economy on food security in Paulatuk, NT, and aims to illustrate: a) how individuals are participating in the wage economy and traditional economy in Paulatuk, and in turn how this influences their ability to procure food from the land, as illustrated in Chapter 2; and b) the impact of income on the ability of residents to procure food from the store and through the Food Mail program, as shown in Chapter 3. The thesis aims to answer the question: “how does the wage economy affect the ability of individuals to procure food from the land and the store in Paulatuk, NT?” The influence of the wage economy on the traditional economy must be considered holistically, and store-bought and country foods must be considered as two equal parts of the food security equation in Paulatuk."

In February 2002, Yukon College lost a visionary founder. Aron Senkpiel had joined the new college in 1983 and devoted almost twenty years of his professional life to developing university-level programs at the college, to brokering professional degrees for delivery in the Yukon, and to laying the groundwork for the college's future evolution to granting its own degrees. Giving Yukoners an option to stay without compromise was his goal. The paper is a Festschrif contribution, a documentation and a celebration of Senkpiel's important work. It is the contribution of a former student and later a colleague who has been most fortunate to have worked with him and has been able to contribute in some small way to this important work.

In the early twentieth century, the Canadian Lakehead was known as a breeding ground for revolution, a place where harsh conditions in dockyards, lumber mills, and railway yards drove immigrants into radical labour politics.

This intensely engaging history reasserts Northwestern Ontario’s rightful reputation as a birthplace of leftism in Canada by exposing the conditions that gave rise to an array of left-wing organizations, including the Communist Party, the One Big Union, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Yet, as Michel Beaulieu shows, the circumstances and actions of Lakehead labour, especially those related to ideology, ethnicity, and personality were complex; they simultaneously empowered and fettered workers in their struggles against the shackles of capitalism. Cultural ties helped bring left-wing ideas to Canada but, as each group developed a distinctive vocabulary of socialism, Anglo-Celtic workers defended their privileges against Finns, Ukrainians, and Italians. At the Lakehead, ethnic difference often outweighed class solidarity -- at the cost of a stronger labour movement for Canada.

Comment proposer une « cartographie du Nord » par l’analyse de lieux ou d’espaces qui concentrent une ou plusieurs formes de mémoire, tout en étant parfois laissés à l’abandon, voire condamnés à l’oubli ? Comment ces « territoires discursifs » se sont-ils constitués et, s’il y a lieu, ont-ils été abandonnés ? Comment ont-ils été réinventés ou convoqués par l’art, la photo­graphie, la politique, la muséographie, le tourisme, la musique, l’architecture, le cinéma, la littérature ? Sont-ils partie prenante d’une mémoire septentrionale commune à plusieurs cultures du Nord ou d’une mémoire universelle ? Sont-ils aujourd’hui l’objet de visées prospectives ? Les articles qui composent le présent ouvrage, provenant d’une dizaine de pays, se veulent une réponse, bien partielle, mais tout de même nouvelle, à toutes ces interrogations.

Avec des articles de Stéphanie Bellemare-Page, Jan Borm, Daniel Chartier, Florence Davaille, Alice Duhan, Tiffany Johnstone, Sabine Kraenker, Paul Landon, Brian Martin, Carmen Mata Barreiro, Odile Parsis-Barubé, Manon Regimbald, Jette Rygaard, Katri Suhonen, Ulla Tuomarla, Stéphanie Vallières et Maria Walecka-Garbalinska.

Ce livre est copublié par les Presses de l’Université du Québec et l’Université de Stockholm.

The manifesto for the establishment of Yukon College's academic journal The Northern Review. The paper discusses the state of Northern Research c. 1987 and the need to establish a research paradigm and capacity to conduct research "In the North, For the North, and By the North." This is the first paper published in Yukon College's Northern Review: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the North

In this essay, I argue that by juxtaposing Shelley’s prescient Frankenstein (1818) with Richard Power’s American novel, The Echo Maker (2006) the reader can see how novels, both old and new, and, more specifically, the environmental humanities, are contributing to growing awareness of the Global North’s long term/large scale human impact on the planet and how the human species might actually act to transform themselves in ways that lead to monstrosity (as metaphorically represented by Dr. Frankenstein’s monster) or in ways that transform the human species into beings that are more aware of an “ethic of care” that sees the planet as truly a “commons” that must be distributed democratically (as metaphorically represented by Power’s character Karin), rather than enclosed for the wealthy few.  Thus, such a cultural and ecological analysis of classical literature alongside twenty-first century texts can help readers re-imagine ones’ life, community, and environment in relation to what constitutes a sustainable environment in a globalized world.

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Résumé Depuis 1964, on peut compter quatre périodes lors desquelles des tentatives ou des propositions d’une université nordique ont été faites pour les territoires canadiens. La première, entre 1964 et 1982, coïncida avec une motivation des forces nationales inhérente à l’expansion de l’après-guerre et à la revitalisation de l’enseignement postsecondaire avec la création d’universités et de collèges communautaires, le développement du Nord et les revendications territoriales. Dans la deuxième période, allant de 1983 à 2000, les gouvernements des territoires établirent les collèges Yukon et Arctic, des institutions s’apparentant à des niveaux universitaires. La troisième période dite circumpolaire, de 2001 à 2011, le monde arctique franchit une étape et établit le réseau des universités de l’Arctique. La quatrième phase surnommée l’académique débute le 14 octobre 2014, alors que le gouvernement du Yukon et le Conseil des gouverneurs du Collège du Yukon annoncent conjointement la cré...

This one-day conference invites post-graduate and early-career researchers to discuss the issues and complexities that arise in constructions of ‘the North’ and Northern identity.

Send 500 word abstracts to:

Rebecca Andrew: [email protected] and
Stephen Etheridge: [email protected]

By 16th August 2013."

The creation, by federal letters patent, of The University of Canada North (UCN) in March 1971, is an important event in the history of education in the Canadian North. The brain-child of Richard Rohmer, a prominent Toronto lawyer, and some fifty-seven residents of the two northern territories, the UCN initiative was intended to be a grass-roots northern institution responsive to specific northern needs. The idea was good and the motives noble. Yet, practically from its inception, UCN was beset by problems serious enough to first stunt its growth and eventually to suffocate it entirely. Those problems were rooted in philosophical and conceptual differences about the kind of institution the new university and exacerbated by financial and administrative difficulties.