Authors and Contributors

Malgorzata (Gosia) Smieszek

Project coordinator at the UiT Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and a researcher collaborating with the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland in Finland. Her research interests include international environmental regimes, Arctic and ocean governance, questions of science–policy interface, and the gender–environment nexus. Gosia has worked on a number of national and international projects, including for the European Commission, Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Finland's Prime Minister Office, Germany's Arctic Office, and most recently for Iceland's Chairmanship of the Arctic Council. She was also the co-organiser of the 4th China-Nordic Arctic Cooperation Symposium (CNARC), a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and one of the lead contributors to the EU–Polarnet White Papers. Over the years, Gosia has been involved with the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) as its fellow, a chair of IASC Action Group on Communicating Arctic Science to Policy Makers, and a representative of IASC to the meetings of the Arctic Council. She is a member of the steering committee of the North Pacific Arctic Conference (NPAC) of the East–West Center (EWC) and the Korea Maritime Institute (KMI). Outside of work, Gosia loves spending time in nature and is currently completing the mindfulness meditation teacher certification program.

Tahnee Prior

Killam Postdoctoral Fellow with the Marine & Environmental Law Institute of the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Her research interests include global environmental governance, international law, complex systems theory, Arctic and oceans governance, and the nexus of gender and environment. Tahnee is also a collaborator on a project titled Women of the Arctic Ocean: Exploring the Intersection of Gender, Indigeneity & the Law of the Sea in the Canadian Arctic, funded through an Oceans Frontier Institute Seed Grant. Together with Gosia Smieszek, Tahnee co-leads Women of the Arctic, a non-profit association registered in Finland whose mission is to raise awareness of, support for, and maintain a focus on women and gender-related issues in the Arctic. Tahnee has published research on gender and the circumpolar North in various capacities, including as a team member of an Academy of Finland funded project on Human Security as a Promotional Tool for Societal Security in the Arctic (HuSArctic), as a contributing author to the 2016 Arctic Resilience Report, and as the lead researcher of a project on climate change and human rights commissioned by Finland's Ministry for Foreign Affairs at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland. Tahnee holds a Ph.D. and Masters in Global Governance from the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Franklin University Switzerland.

AMAP

Arctic Council

Brynhildur Davíðsdóttir

Torjus Solheim Eckhoff

Torjus Solheim Eckhoff is a research assistant at GRID-Arendal. He has an interdisciplinary background in social- and natural sciences and is working within GRID-Arendal´s Polar and climate programme. Here he works on a a variety of projects spanning from marine litter in the Arctic to environmental assessments in mountain regions. Torjus also has an interest in quantitative text analysis, which he uses to get increase our understanding of the development of discourse over time.

Dina Abdel Fattah

Dina Abdel-Fattah holds a PhD in Natural Resources and Sustainability from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is an associate professor at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway´s Department of Technology and Safety and she also holds a joint position as a senior lecturer at Stockholm University´s Department of Computer and Systems Science. Dina has an interdisciplinary background in both natural and social sciences. Her work and research span social science, computer science, and glaciology. Dina teaches Humanitarian and Emergency Logistics and supervises several Bachelor´s and Master´s students at UiT. Her research largely focuses on decision-making and risk analysis, from a natural hazards perspective. She is also interested in, and an advocate for, research and topics related to gender, both from a societal and institutional perspective.

Devlin Fernandes

Sara Fusco

PhD student in environmental law and indigenous rights at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lapland. Her research focuses on the concept of Environmental Justice in the Arctic under indigenous right and through national constitutional comparison. She currently lectures in Comparative Law at the University of Akureyri, where she graduated in Polar Law in 2019. She collaborates as Research Assistant at Stefansson Arctic Institute and Icelandic Arctic Cooperation Network. She holds an MA in Law from the University of Florence (2017) and enriched her academic career at University of in Oslo (in Gender Equality, 2015), University of Helsinki (in Human Rights law, 2015-2016) and the University of Greenland (Natural Resources Management, 2018) and at University of Copenhagen (in Political Science, 2016). She collaborates with the Icelandic academic E-Journal Nordicum- Mediterraneum as Special Editor for legal and arctic studies. She is also Vice-President of an Italian non-profit association "Ferma Le Tue Mani", which deals with assistance and information for victims of sexual violence in Italy.

Siri Gerrard

Cv: connected to UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø and The University college of Alta ( now UiT) since 1972 as a student, lecturer, senior lecturer and professor, since 2017 as professor emerita. During the university career I have been teaching, had varios positions in research politics and in research.. My research interests have been and still are fishery culture, women and gender in fisheries, fisheries villages in North Norway, Tanzania and Cameroon and gender and migration.

Tonje Margrete Winsnes Johansen

Tonje Margrete Winsnes Johansen works as an adviser for the Saami Council's Arctic- and Environmental Unit. Johansen comes from a small coastal-Sámi village in the northern parts of Sápmi on the Norwegian side and is currently residing in Guovdageaidnu. She has a political science background from NTNU. Within the Saami Council Johansen focuses most of her work on sustainable development and socio-economic issues in Sápmi.

Sohvi Kangasluoma

Sohvi is a Ph.D Candidate in World Politics, working at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Currently she is part of a project FLOWISION: Best from both worlds – enhancing energy transition in Russia and Finland by making resource flows visible, funded by Kone Foundation. In her work she focuses on the entaglements of gender, environment, fossil fuel production, emotions and human security, in the Norwegian and Russian Arctic. She draws inspiration from the northern nature, the sea and the mountains.

Anna Karlsdóttir

Anna Karlsdóttir has a PhD in social Sciences from Roskilde University, Denmark. She has been lecturer and associate professor at human geography and tourism studies at University of Iceland since 2002 (on leave of absence until 2023). As Senior Research fellow at Nordregio since 2015 she has functioned as coordinator of the Nordic Arctic Working Group (2013-2016) and responsible administrator of the Arctic Cooperation Programme since 2016, secretariat leader for the Nordic Thematic Group on sustainable rural development and coordinator for the Nordic Integration Programme for refugees and immigrants. She has conducted studies on various issues regarding shifts in primary industries occupations (fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture) in rural communities in North Atlantic region and circumpolar Arctic, employment diversification and tourism related occupations and the link to regional development, seaborn tourism, youth and gender. She has been involved in North Atlantic, Nordic, European, US and Canadian networks research since 1996.

Sarah Seabrook Kendall

Master's student in the Environment and Natural Resources program at the University of Iceland and holds a B.A. in English and Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She has also completed coursework at the University Center in Svalbard. She is passionate about the Arctic and understanding how its societies function as a part of the natural environment. Her research interests include Arctic governance, sustainable development, climate change adaptation, and environmental management. In addition to her work as a co-lead author on the Security chapter in the GEA III Report, she is writing her thesis, Social Cultural Valuation of Whales and Climate Change Adaptation, in Húsavík, Iceland, through the University of Iceland's participation in ARCPATH, a project that aims to promote sustainable societies in the Arctic as a part of the Joint Nordic Initiative on Arctic Research. Apart from her studies and research work, Sarah is an avid outdoorswoman who loves spending as much time in the Icelandic sea and mountains as possible.

Fanny-Tsilla Koninckx

Fanny-Tsilla Koninckx is a research intern at the Arctic Institute, and has recently graduated from a master’s degree in International Relations at the Institute for Political Science of Strasbourg in France.

She holds a bachelor’s in law from the University of Toulouse Capitole, and her interest in the involvement of climate change in socio-economic and political governance has led her to focus on the Arctic region. She is particularly interested in understanding the importance of environmental cooperation in Arctic countries relations and how to build climate-resilient societies, taking into account local populations.

She has been an intern and then a consultant at GRID-Arendal in Norway, for the Polar and Climate program, participating in projects dealing with the sources and the consequences of marine litter in the Arctic ocean. It is in this context that she has worked with Gosia Smieszek and Tahnee Prior, looking at Arctic pollution and waste from a gender perspective.

David Natcher

David Natcher is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Trained as a Cultural Anthropologist, Dr. Natcher represents Canada on the International Arctic Science Committee, Social and Human Working Group and the Social, Economic and Cultural Expert Group for the Arctic Councils Sustainable Development Working Group.

Per Jonas Partapuoli

Mr Per Jonas Partapuoli (MSc) is born and raised in Laevas Sami Village, a reindeer herding district in Kiruna municipality, Sweden, where his family works with reindeer husbandry. Mr Partapuoli has been active in the Saami Council for many years, advising on issues related to reindeer husbandry among the Sami people and mental health and wellbeing. Mr Partapuoli is also a board member of the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry (ICR) since 2014. ICR was established by the Norwegian Government in 2005 as a contribution to the unique international cooperation of circumpolar reindeer herding peoples.

Mr Partapuoli has been active in issues regarding mental health among indigenous peoples, especially advocating for reindeer herders. He has represented the Saami Council at the Scientific Advisory Group for the RISING SUN, a project by Arctic Council on mental health. Mr Partapuoli has also been a board member of the Sami Youth Organization in Sweden, Sáminuorra, where he served as the president from 2013 to 2015. During those years, he worked actively as an advocate for indigenous peoples and their traditional lands and empowering the Sámi youth while addressing the policies and decisions concerning their territories.

Mr Partapuoli is a health economist with an MSc in finance and economics.

Alexandra Poturaeva

Aleksandra Poturaeva is a graduate of the department of socio-economic geography of foreign countries, faculty of Geography, Lomonosov Moscow State University (bachelor – in 2015, master – in 2017). She has been a graduate student at the same affiliation since 2018 and is currently working on a PhD thesis on the topic “Gender geography of the Arctic in the context of regional demographic, economic, cultural and political problems.” She is also an expert at the nonprofit organization, Institute of Regional Consulting in Moscow (since October 2017 as a permanent employee, at 2016-2017 as a contractor).

Víðir Ragnarsson

Tina H.P. Schoolmeester

Tina Schoolmeester is a marine geologist and head of the Polar and Climate Programme at GRID-Arendal, a Norway-based environmental non-profit. She has worked on a variety of topics in marine, polar and high mountain contexts, aiming to communicate scientific findings in an accessible way to help policy-makers develop sustainable solutions to the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. She has focused increasingly on the big picture, notably the linkages between natural systems and the people living in these systems. Recently she has worked to bring gender dimensions into these discussions, contributing to publications on the gender and environment nexus.

Kathryn Urban

Graduate student at American University’s School of International Service, Project Coordinator for Bridging the Gap.

Kathryn Urban is a master’s candidate of global security at American University’s School of International Service as well as Project Coordinator for the Bridging the Gap program, which seeks to bring together academic and practitioner voices on foreign policy topics. She graduated George Washington University summa cum laude in January 2019 with a BA in International Affairs, where she served as a Research Assistant for Dr. Robert Orttung and PIRE Arctic.

Pál Weihe

For over 30 years, Dr. Pál Weihe has led the Department of Occupational Medicine and Public Health in the Faroe Islands and, for part of this period, as Medical Director of the Faroese Hospital System. He also is an Adjunct Professor at the University of the Faroe Islands, a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Visiting Scientist at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark. Between 2005 and 2016, Dr. Weihe served as Chair of the Faroese Board of Public Health.

Dr. Weihe is deeply committed to serving his community through the provision of medical care and devotion to his work on minimizing community exposures to marine contaminants. Specifically, he has overseen the examinations of over 3,000 Faroe Islanders of five prospective studies of birth cohorts exposed to marine contaminants associated with neurotoxicity, growth, and development, immunotoxicity, and endocrine disruption. He is also involved in other research areas such as reproductive toxicological studies of time to pregnancy and semen quality as well as age-related functional deficits and degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and cardiovascular diseases, concerning lifetime exposure to methylmercury and persistent lipophilic contaminants.

Dr. Weihe has published more than 150 scientific papers in per reviewed scientific journals and books and been invited to more than 120 conferences and lectures.