Keynote speakers

Disentangling wild places

Dr. Phillip Vannini is an accomplished ethnographer, filmmaker and author who has conducted research on BC Ferries, off-grid living, small island cultures and communities, wildness and wilderness, everyday life, the cultural aspects of the human senses, food and culture, and sense of place. Currently he is researching the cultural dimensions of UNESCO World Heritage natural sites, across both Canada and the world. Recently Vannini published Off the Grid: Re-Assembling Domestic Life, the culmination of three years of research into the lives of people across Canada who live off the grid, a project that led to the production of the film Life off-grid.

NatureCultureElectric: Going on together with energy

Laura Watts is an ethnographer of futures and a Senior Lecturer in Energy & Society at University of Edinburgh. Her research as a Science & Technology studies (STS) scholar is concerned with the effect of 'edge' landscapes on how the future is imagined and made. She has collaborated with the mobile telecoms industry, the public transport sector, and for the past decade she has been working with energy futures in the Orkney islands, Scotland. Her latest book, Energy Islands Saga, based on this research, is due to be published by MIT Press. She is also co-author of Ebban an' Flowan, a poetry primer to marine renewable energy, the author of The Energy Walk, an ethnographic installation around the seascape of the Danish Wave Energy Centre, and a winner of the International Cultural Innovation Prize, along with the Reconstrained Design Group, for a community-built energy storage solution, made from local spare parts.

All Our Relations and the Logic of the Gift: Indigenous Resurgences of Relationality

Rauna Kuokkanen is Research Professor of Arctic Indigenous Politics at the University of Lapland, Finland. She also holds a position of Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Her main areas of research include comparative Indigenous politics, Indigenous feminist theory, Indigenous women’s rights and Arctic Indigenous governance. Professor Kuokkanen’s new book Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender, forthcoming by Oxford University Press in 2018, is an Indigenous feminist investigation of the theory and practice of Indigenous self-determination, governance and gender regimes in Indigenous political institutions. Her other books include Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes and the Logic of the Gift (UBC Press, 2007) and Boaris dego eana: Eamiálbmogiid diehtu, filosofiijat ja dutkan (translated title: As Old as the Earth. Indigenous Knowledge, Philosophies and Research, Čálliidlágádus, Sámi Academica Series, 2009).  She was the founding chair of the Sámi Youth Organization in Finland and has served as the Vice-President of the Sámi Council. She has also long worked and advocated for the protection of Sámi sacred sites, particularly Suttesája, a sacred Sámi spring in Northern Finland. She is from Ohcejohka/Utsjoki, Sápmi (Finland).

Engineered future – reflections on the role of applied sciences on sustainability

Dr. Päivö Kinnunen graduated with a PhD in Applied Physics at the University of Michigan in 2011. He worked briefly in industry, commercializing a medical application of the findings, before returning to academia. He is currently senior researcher at the Fibre and Particle Engineering Unit at the University of Oulu. He has published scientific papers with a broad multidisciplinary nature from theoretical physics to environmental engineering and nanomaterials with several patented inventions. Currently he is coordinating several projects in the area of circular economy and sustainable construction materials.