Keynote Speakers
Laura Watts is an ethnographer of futures and Professor in Energy & Society at University of Edinburgh, whose research explores the effect of 'edge' landscapes on how the future is imagined and made, as well as methods for writing futures otherwise. As a Science & Technology Studies (STS) scholar she has collaborated on energy futures for the past decade in the Orkney islands, Scotland. Her latest book Energy at the End of the World: an Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press) won the 4S Rachel Carson Prize, was Shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year, and Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize. In 2017 she won the International Cultural Innovation Prize with the Reconstrained Design Group for a community-built energy storage device designed from scrap parts. More on her research at www.sand14.com.
Mark Rifkin. Mark Rifkin is a professor of Indigenous studies, queer studies, and U.S. literature at UNC Greensboro, primarily researching Native American literary and political writing and their encounters with colonial legal and administrative regimes. Rifkin has written a series of books elaborating concepts of indigeneity as a source of profoundly decolonizing challenges, including Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (2017).
In addition to the keynote, Rifkin will be joining Liisa-Rávná Finbog on a panel about settler colonial temporalities, Indigenous temporal sovereignty, and processes of “truth and reconciliation”. The panel follows the publication, in June, of the report of the commission investigating Norwegianisation policies and injustice against the Sámi and Kven/Norwegian Finnish peoples.
Special Guests
Michelle Bastian. Dr Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities in the College of Art at Edinburgh. She works across critical time studies and the environmental humanities with an interest in phenology (the scientific study of life cycle timing in plants and animals), timekeeping technologies, field philosophy methods and community responses to climate breakdown.
Liisa-Rávna Finbog. Dr. Finbog is an Indigenous scholar and duojár at Tampere University. A long-time practitioner of the Sámi craft and storytelling practice of duodji, her PhD in museology broke new grounds elaborating duodji as a Sámi system of knowledge. In addition to her scholarship and activism, Finbog is a curator and part of the team behind The Sámi Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.