Days of Future Past: Archives for Research and Learning

REGISTER HERE by 10th of March (00:00 EET). Refreshments will be provided.

Programme*

*The order and topic of the talks can be subject to change.

• 09-00 - 09:20 Refreshments and Informal Networking
• 09:20 - 09:30 opening (Alberto Amore, University of Oulu)
• 09:30 – 11:00 part 1
  • 09:30 – 10:00 Long term perspectives on climate and behaviour from Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan by Dr Emma Pomeroy (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)
  • 10:00 – 10:30 Mattering the archive: entangled encounters of place/space/time in the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard by Dr Dina Broderoger (University of Leuven, Belgium)
  • 10:30 – 11:00 Baltic Blues: Multispecies encounters and military waste in the archive of the Baltic Sea by Dr Cecilia Åsberg (University of Linköping, Sweden)
• 11:00 – 11:30 Break
• 11:30 – 13:30 part 2
  • 11:30 - 12:00 Talk TBC by Dr Ari-Pekka Auvinen (Syke)
  • 12:00 -12:30 Accelerating loss of Alaskan Glaciers by Prof. Bethan Davies (University of Newcastle)
  • 12:30 13:00: Tracks and pathways to ski tourism and the climate crisis by Dr Cenk Demiroglu (University of Umeå)
  • 13:00 – 13: 30 The Finnish Biobank Cluster and its Value Prof. Seppo Vainio (Kvantum Institute and University of Oulu)
• 13:30 – 13:35 closing (Alberto Amore, University of Oulu

1. Dr. Emma Pomeroy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK and a Fellow of Newnham College. Having completed a PhD in Biological Anthropology, her research interests encompass the relationship between skeletal morphology and both environmental and socio-cultural factors, informed by evolutionary perspectives. Her research includes work with contemporary populations through to Palaeolithic human remains, seeking to understand how they can be mutually informative about health and skeletal morphology in both the past and present. Currently, she is co-investigator on the Shanidar Cave Project, leading the excavation, conservation and study of new Neanderthal remains from this important Palaeolithic site in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Long term perspectives on climate and behaviour from Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan.

Abstract: Shanidar Cave is an iconic archaeological site, known for the discovery of the skeletal remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women and children (referred to as Shanidar 1-10) by Ralph Solecki’s team between 1951 and 1960, as well as more recent discoveries of new Neanderthal remains during renewed excavations at the cave. Less well known are the important early Holocene remains from proto-Neolithic populations, which often become overshadowed by the focus on Neanderthal remains. New excavations at Shanidar Cave since 2014, led by Professor Graeme Barker, have aimed to enhance our knowledge of the site using modern archaeological approaches, including constructing a more detailed climate record across the last 100,000 years. While this is a work in progress, the site offers a significant opportunity to track human behaviour through changing climates and environments over a prolonged period of time. Archival materials from Solecki’s original excavations, available since 2019 at the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, USA, provide important additional information on the site, its environment, and accompanying diachronic changes in human behaviour. In this talk, I will explore how the archaeological evidence from Shanidar Cave provides the opportunity to understand the links between climate, ecology and human behaviour from the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene, and how these deep time perspectives can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and human health, behaviour and biology.

2. Dr. Dina Broderoger is a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium. She is currently working on several projects, all based in the European Arctic: Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland, and the maritime spaces in-between them. Her interests range from embodied and mediated understandings of place to perceptions of disaster risk and how that impacts people’s behavior in the environment. Dina uses an identity-of-place framework and visual methods of inquiry. In 2022, Dina received the Rachel Tanur Memorial Visual Sociology Award. In 2023, Dina was awarded a Grímsson Fellowship to conduct work in Iceland.

Mattering the archive: entangled encounters of place/space/time in the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard

Abstract: Working in cultural studies, my research includes memories and lived experiences as well as non-human elements from the past and present. My presentation will be based on a diffractive reading of the archives using a multi-perspectival approach that acknowledges the need for multiple (and fluid) temporal and spatial scales. Grounded in an identity-of-place framing that de-centers the human, I will unpack several of my projects that have worked at the intersection of place- and experienced- based knowledge alongside human-made objects and other material elements (be they from local archives or ‘not archived’). The presentation will question what one considers 'data' and 'storage of data' and how memories and lived experiences are or are not ‘stored’. It will explore what archiving ‘does’ and what people from different time periods may want it to do. Using concrete examples, it will bring in questions of how we see and ‘frame’ objects—be they (un)intentionally kept, unruly, de- or re- contextualized. It will explore questions of what is kept in an archive, and what is not, and how that impacts how we see the past or intend for the future to see us as well as to question what (and who) that archive is for.

3. Prof. Dr. Cecilia Åsberg is chair of Gender, Nature, Culture at interdisciplinary Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University, Sweden and Founding Director of research incubator The Posthumanities Hub. Her postdisciplinary research spans feminist theory-practices in ecological, biological and technological humanities, arts and sciences. Åsberg founded the Swedish-international Environmental Humanities research programme, the Seed Box, in 2013 and has since devoted considerable efforts to intersections of waste and embodiment in the social sciences and humanities. For instance, questions around the cultural heritage of the waste of today, in waters, bodies and wounded landscapes, and how to become better ancestors for future generations inheriting climate change and loss of biodiversity. She directs the Posthumanities Hub, a feminist research group and a platform for the more-than-human arts of attending to the wounds and wonders of the world. Present projects range artistic AI, anthropocene heritage and military waste, forest politics and citizen environmental humanities, multispecies methodologies, and arts of soils and oceans.

Baltic Blues: Multispecies encounters and military waste in the archive of the Baltic Sea

Abstract: At the end of World War II, tens of thousands of tons of chemical warfare agents – mostly mustard gas – were dumped in the Baltic Sea. Decades later, these weapons are being reactivated – both literally (perhaps on the faces of dead seals, and in fishermen’s nets) and in our imagination as Russian hybrid warfare with oil tank extortions, electronic cable sabotage and military waste reappear on the news as very real ecological threats to the already hard-pressed and environmentally exposed Baltic Sea. In this story, that situates the Baltic Sea as an “archive” (see Ann Cvetkovich), militarization meets with environmental concerns, and Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence”. The past floats into the future, and humans and non-humans are equally implicated, in this feminist environmental posthumanities exploration of unknowns and alien encounters in the brackish setting of the Baltic Sea and its unfathomable underwater exposures.

4. Ari-Pekka Auvinen

5. Prof. Dr. Bethan Davies is a Professor of Glaciology at Newcastle University. Her research quantifies how ice masses behave in different climates and environments and has a global geographical coverage including the British-Irish Ice Sheet, Patagonia, the Andes, Alaska, Austria, Svalbard and the Antarctic Peninsula. She has undertaken multiple remote polar expeditions to the Antarctic, the high Andes and the Arctic. She was awarded the Richardson Medal by the International Glaciological Society in 2024, the Medal for Antarctic Education and Communication by SCAR in 2022, the Gordon Warwick medal for excellence in geomorphological research by the British Society for Geomorphology (2021) and the Lewis Penny Medal by the Quaternary Research Association in 2014. She is a member of the Board of Directors and trustee of the charity Antarctic Science Ltd., a member of the UK Antarctic Placenames Committee, chair of the UK Arctic-Antarctic Partnership and co-chair of Diversity in Polar Science Initiative. She is currently Editor for Quaternary Science Reviews.

Accelerating Loss of Alaskan Glaciers

Abstract: The Juneau Icefield, Alaska, lost ice at an accelerated rate after 2005, relative to the past 250 years. Rates of area shrinkage were found to be 5 times faster from 2015–2019 than from 1979–1990. The continuation of this trend could push glacial retreat beyond the point of possible recovery.
Climate-driven ice loss from glaciers and icefields has been shown to contribute to rising sea-levels, with Alaska expected to remain the largest regional contributor to this effect up to the year 2100. Alaskan glaciers are particularly vulnerable to changes in the climate because they are often top-heavy (with more area at a higher altitude) and located on plateaus. In addition, these factors make Alaskan glaciers more prone to threshold behaviour, in which exceeding a tipping point could result in an irreversible recession. Longer-term records of Alaskan glacier change are needed to understand how climate change impacts these glaciers.
We used historical records, aerial photographs, 3D terrain maps, and satellite imagery to reconstruct Juneau Icefield glacier behaviour over the past 250 years. We observed steady glacier volume loss at a rate of approximately 0.65 km3 per year between 1770–1979. This rate accelerated to approximately 3 km3 per year between 1970–2010 and then doubled to 5.9 km3 per year between 2010–2020. This ice loss acceleration between 2010–2020 was accompanied by a glacial thinning rate 1.9 times higher than that from 1979–2000 and increased icefield fragmentation. This reduction in icefield accumulation area is contributing to a positive feedback loop, including increasing glacier disconnection and fragmentation. Lowering albedo occurs where surfaces such as darker rock are increasingly exposed, reducing solar reflectivity, and further contributing to the recession.
The findings suggest that a physical mechanism are contributing to this icefield moving towards an irreversible tipping point in glacier recession. This greater understanding of Alaskan glacier ice loss mechanisms could improve projections of near-future sea level rise.

6. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cenk Demiroglu is an associate professor at the Department of Geography at Umeå University, Sweden. His research is focused on the interrelationships of climate change and tourism, and he has served as an expert to several relevant bodies such as the International Society of Biometeorology, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East Climate Change Initiative, the Arctic Council, the Tourism Panel on Climate Change, and UN Tourism. Besides, he has taken active roles in several destination development projects and teaches tourism and geographical information systems related courses at the basic and advanced levels.

Tracks and Pathways to Ski Tourism and the Climate Crisis

Abstract: Ski tourism is one of the most popular forms of ice-and-snow-based-tourism (IST), i.e. "cryotourism", catering to the wellbeing and recreation of millions of enthusiasts and the socioeconomic development of many communities especially within the peripheral and rural areas. That being said, ski tourism is also one of the most immediately and the most impactfully affected tourism type by the ongoing climate crisis. As part of the global tourism system that is highly based on travels consuming fossil fuels, ski tourism is also one cause of the crisis itself. Here, Cenk will introduce us to a Web GIS (geographical information systems) application that visualizes and overlays ski tourism geographies, and related climate indicators in terms of both the impacts and the footprints observed and projected, setting an agenda for future research and action.

7. Prof. Dr. Seppo Vainio is a Professor of Developmental Biology at the University of Oulu. His research focuses on developmental biology, regenerative medicine, and molecular mechanisms governing organogenesis. He is internationally recognized for his studies on nephrogenesis. His interdisciplinary research aims to bridge molecular biology, biotechnology, and digital health solutions for advancing preventive medicine. Prof. Vainio is also involved in citizen science initiatives aimed at democratizing health monitoring. His current molecularly digitized biosensor solutions and data, promoting early disease identification through accessible, wearable biosensing devices. Prof. Vainio currently serves as Scientific Director and group lesder in the Kvantum Institute, group leader in Infotech Oulu and vice director of Flasghip GeneCellNano.

The Finnish Biobank Cluster and its Value

Abstract: Biobanks are specialized repositories that collect, process, store, and distribute biological samples and associated data for research purposes. In Finland, biobanks are regulated under the Biobank Act. The legislation promotes national-level coordination, ensuring efficient use of resources and standardization of processes. It allows also the use of historical samples collected in healthcare settings for research, significantly expanding the scope of available data. This talk introduces two biobank initiatives in Finland (Finngen and the Finnish Biobank Cooperative) and their importance to broader European biobank activities. The discussion will focus on the protocols and standards for integrating health data, genetics, AI and digital innovation. Additionally, a reflection will be provided as to how these models hold transformative potential for ecosystem studies, enabling large-scale, integrated environmental research with profound implications for sustainability, climate resilience, and biodiversity conservation. By adopting similar strategies, other fields can harness data-driven, interdisciplinary approaches to address pressing global challenges.