Calotte Academy 2016
Calotte Academy 2016: Resilience related to Sustainable Development at focus
The annual travelling symposium Calotte Academy will this year begin its tour with a session held in Rovaniemi on the 30th of May. This year’s conference is taking an explicit focus on resilience related to sustainable development in globalization, particularly the globalized Arctic.
The symposium sessions approach the overarching themes through addressing regionally important questions and concerns. The presentations focus on topics such as mining, tourism, indigenous people’s rights and alternative conceptualizations of sustainability. After the Finnish sessions in Rovaniemi and Inari, the travelling symposium will continue onwards to Kirkenes, Norway and from there to Murmansk in Russia, and then returning to Rovaniemi via Norwegian border-crossing point Storskog-Boris Gleb a week later. The participants attending the touring symposium are mostly early career scientists selected based on applications from the North Calotte area, and Central Europe and Russia, as well as from USA.
The Calotte Academy has been arranged annually since 1991 with an aim to bring together students, other experts, local stakeholders as well as scientists with different academic backgrounds and in different stages of their academic careers. The founder of the Calotte Academy, Professor Lassi Heininen, sees the added value of the Calotte Academy in its explicit aim to create an alternative model for conventional academic conferences where the time allocated for genuine discussion often remains very limited. The Academy also aims to contribute to discussions and debates over regional development through inviting local politicians and stakeholders to participate in the sessions with the intention of sharing research results and insights, creating networks and fostering dialogue between policy-makers, practitioners and other experts, and the international scientific community.
The Calotte Academy 2016 is arranged in cooperation with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lapland, Sámi Educational Centre of Inari, Department of Sociology, Barents Institute at University of Tromsø, and Luzin Institute for Economic Studies at Kola Science Center and Karelian Science Center of Russian Academy of Sciences. It is a part of the activities of the UArctic and Northern Research Forum joint Thematic Network on Geopolitics and Security. The Calotte Academy receives financial support from University of Lapland, Barents Institute, Norwegian Barents Secretariat and International Arctic Science Commission.