Ongoing Projects
Edition project by the University of Paris Saclay/UVSQ, the University of Iceland and Sögufélag - Icelandic Historical Society on the Moravian handwritten source material from the journey to Iceland 1740-43 (Joanna Kodzik and Sumarliði R Ísleifsson).
This project is dedicated to Moravian handwritten source material from the 18th century (1730-1760) about Iceland. It aims to shed light on unknown part of the history of the Moravian church and analyses the foreign views of Iceland in one of the earliest German eye-witness accounts from this island which is rare in the Icelandic history in this time. The project focuses on the cultural mobility between the German religious group mentioned above and the Icelandic culture explaining ideas about the space, human and climate. It fits the gap in the research on the Moravians in the Arctic who run mission stations in Greenland, Labrador and Alaska and produced significant knew knowledge about people living in Iceland. One of the special values of this project is the analysis of ideas and world views produced by not very well-educated people which deals with life, problems, believes, work and emotions of people from the lower social class – rare sources which were not often produced by craftsmen, farmers or fishers etc. in the 18th century.
From Nunavik to Iceland: Climate, Humans and Culture through Time across the Coastal (Sub) Arctic North Atlantic, Belmont Forum, 2020-23, 632 000 €, PI Anne de Vernal (UQAM, Montreal, Canada).
The overarching goal of NICH-Arctic is to explore and assess the resilience and vulnerability of the environment in a subpolar latitudinal zone marked by large amplitude climate and sea-ice variations. This project combines geological, historical, instrumental records and narrative information from the cultural practices and the representations of Nordic environments through the literature. NICH-Arctic proposes investigations of coastal regions where climate conditions and sea ice play a vital role in accessibility through navigation and livelihood of the cultural communities.
From West to East, the study regions include the Nunavik in northern Québec, Labrador, southwest Greenland and northern Iceland. The succession of different cultures, including Paleo-Eskimo (Saqqaq, Pre-Dorset and Dorset) and Neo-Eskimo (Inuit), in Nunavik, Labrador and Greenland, and the Norse settlers, in Iceland and Greenland, illustrates a wide range of adaptative strategies to harsh weather conditions, climatic variations, ocean and sea-ice instabilities and ecological stresses since early migrations via Alaska about 4500 years ago and the Nordic Seas in the 9th to 10th centuries.
The recent evolution of these regions is not well documented from instrumental data, due to the low density of recording stations and the shortness of records, when available. Disciplinary knowledge has been developed, but with little transdisciplinary exchanges and limited communication between scientists and stakeholders. Here, NICH-Arctic takes advantage of the large array of disciplinary expertise of the team members, added to their knowledge of the research areas, to develop a truly integrated multidisciplinary understanding of climate, habitat, archeology and culture relations, from past to on-going changes in the Arctic and subarctic Atlantic realm.
Funded by Agence interuniversitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), programme "Projets interuniversitaires de solidarité dans les Amériques".
Partners: Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Universidad del Salvador (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and UVSQ.
Duration: 1 August 2020 - 30 November 2023
This cooperation project aims to bring together a multidisciplinary team of specialists and students in law, cultural studies and literature. Its main objective is to develop a reflection on the question of indigenous rights and cultural representations related to territoriality, tourism, exploitation of natural ressources and the environment, by initiating multidisciplinary scientific cooperation and promoting scientific exchanges in French (including short mobilities of professors) between Argentina, Canada and France while allowing students to acquire international experience through internships (in France, Quebec and Argentina) and through their participation in international activities - a round table, a conference and a publication.
