Authors and Contributors

Erika Anne Hayfield

Erika Anne Hayfield is Associate Professor at the Department of History and Social Science, University of the Faroe Islands. She is the Programme Director for the master’s programme in History and Social Science. Erika’s PhD is a study of children’s cultures of consumption in which she applied an ethnographic approach, of which gendered consumption was one theme of the PhD. Her work has involved childhood and participation as well as migration and mobilities. She has written on gender and the labour market and gendered work mobilities, young people’s out-migration and immigrant belonging in the small community of the Faroe Islands. Presently, Erika’s work is focused on gender equality and making a living in isolated labour markets, social relations in small communities, COVID-19 coping strategies, as well as the ethical challenges of conducting qualitative research in small places, which are characterised by intimacy and interconnectedness. Erika teaches gender and welfare, ethics, methodology, migration, and mobilities.

Erika has been a member of the network Gender Equality in the Arctic since 2015. She was involved in the planning of the conference Gender Equality in the Arctic in Akureyri 2015, where she also presented. Furthermore, she was a co-organiser of the sessions on gender equality at the Arctic Circle in the Faroe Islands 2018.

“As a young adult, I out-migrated from the small island community of the Faroe Islands, situated in the high North. As many other youngsters from the Faroe Islands, I pursued education elsewhere, in my case Scotland. As a recurring theme throughout my education, and especially my PhD, I had an interest in gender issues. More than a decade after having left the Faroe Islands, in 2003 I returned to the Islands. Upon my return what struck me was the seeming absence of women in the public media landscape. I recall posing the question “where are all the women?.

Although, there has been social change in the Faroe Islands since then; for me, this first initial impression led me to ponder on gender and gender equality issues for years to come, and still does. Since returning to the islands, I have worked in the private sector, in ministries, and for some years now in academia. Yet, the one topic, which has caught my attention and been woven into the fabric of my working life is that of gender.

In particular, I am concerned with how gender relations are historically, materially, and discursively situated. As such, from my perspective, place-based approaches are significant in understanding how gender is shaped. In the Arctic context, this is not least pertinent given its vast spaces, natural resource-based economies, harsh conditions, remoteness, and diversity of peoples. Not only do these complexities make for exciting exploration, they further require a situated approach to understanding gender.”

Marit Aure

Marit Aure is a professor gender studies in Sociology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a PhD in Planning and Community Studies. Aure has worked with gender in research and also as a consultant for more than 20 years. Her research interests encompass international and national migration and integration, gender, masculinity, employment-related mobility, (coastal) rural and urban development. Aure engages in participatory action research, community involvement and co-production of knowledge. She teaches and supervises at all level at the university and publishes widely nationally and internationally, for fellow researchers and the public. Aure is PI of Sustainable Diverse Cities: Innovation in Integration, The Research Council of Norway.

Stéphanie Barillé

Stéphanie Barillé is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Iceland. She holds a master degree in Social Anthropology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (E.H.E.S.S, France) where she studied belonging, identity and material culture in rural France and rural Sweden. Her current doctoral research explores the experiences of family separation among transnational families in Iceland. Her specific interests include migration, gender, emotions, materiality and consumption. She has published several articles on the experiences of immigrants in Northern Iceland.

Chad R. Farrell

Chad R. Farrell is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His research focuses on urban inequality and the shifting ethnoracial contours of American communities. His work appears in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Urban Studies, and Urban Affairs Review.

Firouz Gaini

Firouz Gaini is professor of anthropology and research leader at the Department of History and Social Sciences, University of the Faroe Islands. His research has focused on young people’s everyday lives, identities, and future perspectives in Arctic, Nordic and small island settings. He has done research on gender (men and masculinities) and family relations (fatherhood) in the Faroe Islands and other North Atlantic communities. Firouz has done fieldwork in the Faroes, Greenland, France and Japan. He is co-editor of the volume “Gender and Island Communities” (Routledge 2020).

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.

Anne Gotfredsen

Anne C. Gotfredsen is a doctoral student in public health at the Epidemiology and Global Health Department, Umeå University and also affiliated with Umeå Centre for Gender Studies. Anne's main research interests concern youth mental health, leisure/civic participation in rural areas and participatory research methods.

Irmelin Gram-Hanssen

Irmelin Gram-Hanssen is doing a PhD at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo as part of the research project AdaptationCONNECTS. Her research focuses on social change and the possibility for sustainable and equitable transformations in the context of climate change. She works in an Indigenous community context and explores the enabling conditions for sustainability transformations, including the role of worldviews and perceptions of agency for change.

Lawrence Hamilton

Lawrence Hamilton is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire (USA). Over the past 25 years he has studied human-environment interactions around the circumpolar North, including research on migration from Arc-tic Alaska, Greenland, and historically fishing-dependent regions of the North Atlantic Arc.

Lara W. Hoffmann

Lara Hoffmann is a PhD student in Social Sciences at the University of Akureyri since 2018, working in the research project „Inclusive Societies? The Integration of Immigrants in Iceland“ which is funded by the Icelandic Research Fund. She holds a research Master’s degree in Art Studies from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is involved in several national and international research projects on migration. She is also active in the field of publishing and art, e.g. as an editor of the literary journal Ós Pressan.

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.

Runa Preeti Ísfeld

Working on a small project for the Faroe Islands University at the moment as I live in Beijing with my husband. Futhermore, I have worked at municipality of Tórshavn where I have written a recommendation for integration for our municipality.

Gréta Bergrún Jóhannesdóttir

PhD student in Sociology at University of Akureyri. Gréta Bergrún lives in Þórshöfn, a small fishing village in North-East Iceland. Since 2009 she has worked in multible projects regarding rural areas and rural researching, and since January 2019 at her PhD project, Young women in Icelandic fishing villages: migration and social context.

Markus Meckl

Markus Meckl holds a Ph.D. from Berlin Technical University where he studied at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism. Since 2004, he has been working at the University of Akureyri in Ice-land where is a professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. In recent years, one of his research interest focused on immigration issues in Iceland. He is involved in immigration and integration-related projects in the Nordic and European countries.

Jana Mortensen

Jana has a Bachelors degree in nursing from the University of Faroe Islands and a Masters degree in organisational Psychology from RUC in Denmark. She is about to finish her Masters degree in Social Sciences from the University of Faroe Islands. She have worked with many aspects of Psychiatric care for many years, among them being interventions with suicidal youngsters. Currently she mostly works with quality improvement at the Psychiatric Center of the Faroe Islands. For the GEA III Report, her role has been that of research assistant and contributing author.

Maria Pitukhina

Maria Pitukhina is a Doctor of Political Science working as a Researcher leader at Petrozavodsk State University and as a Researcher leader at the Institute of Economy at Russian Science Academy (Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia). She defended her Doctoral Degree at St.Petersburg State University. Her research interests lay in the field of migration (youth migration, foreign labour migration), human capital development in the Arctic, indigenous peoples’ sustainability in a labour market. Currently she is the head of the Arctic Demography Index project endorsed by the Sustainable Development Working Group of the Arctic Council under Russian Chairmanship in 2021-2023. Arctic Demography Index project is co-lead by Norway (Nord University) and Canada (University of Laval).

Marya Rozanova-Smith

Dr. Marya S. Rozanova-Smith is Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University (GWU) and Advisor to the Chancellor at the Russian State Hydrometeorological University (RSHU). In addition to her work in academia, she participated in a wide range of social projects. She was a founder and chairwoman of the Center for Civil, Social, Scientific, and Cultural Initiatives “STRATEGIA” (2007–2015), and also served as a Galina Starovoitova Fellow for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center.

Since 2014, Dr. Rozanova-Smith has been (co-)organizing international academic projects on the wide range of Arctic issues that brought together representatives of social and natural sciences, Indigenous communities, and policymakers. She has also initiated educational programs and informal surveys conducted in close collaboration with Indigenous communities and their leaders in Russian Arctic regions. She is currently teaching the course The Arctic in International Affairs at the GWU.

Dr. Rozanova-Smith’s research interests include Arctic governance, Indigenous empowerment, diversity, and women's participation in politics and government in the Arctic.

Vladislava Vladimirova

Longer bio: Vladislava Vladimirova is a cultural anthropologist who is involved in long-term research in Circumpolar Eurasia. Her main interests are in the field of indigenous governance and ethnicity, environmental governance and justice, gender, moral economy, and conservation of environmental and cultural heritage in the Arctic. In addition to numerous book chapters and journal articles, she is the author of the book Just labor: labor ethic in a post-Soviet reindeer herding community (2006), for which she was awarded the Westin Prize by the Royal Society for Humanities at Uppsala (2009). In 2018 Vadislava Vladimirova and Otto Habeck were guest editors to a special issue of the journal Polar Geography on Gender in the Arctic.

Nafisa Yeasmin

Nafisa Yeasmin, Doctor of Social Sciences is the lead of UArctic Thematic Network on Arctic Migration. She is recently leading several projects related to the integration of immigrants specially immigrant youth and women. Despite, she has also conducted broader research on (im)migration. She has been involved as an expert in various international and national advisory boards and has published on her topics of interest.