A short research note reflecting on the May 2013 Arctic Council meeting in Kiruna, Sweden, has just been published in Polar Record. This piece, which I co-authored with Klaus Dodds, bypasses the events at the meeting that attracted most attention — the admission of six new states as permanent observers and the deferral of a decision on the European Union’s application — and instead probes the Council’s failure to address the applications of seven non-state organizations that also had applied for permanent observer status.
The Kiruna meeting and issues surrounding the admission of new permanent observers is the topic of a larger project in media depictions of the Arctic Council that I am beginning to undertake with Johanne Bruun and Ingrid Agnete Medby, both soon-to-be doctoral students in Geography at Durham University. Assisting us is a stellar team of translators: Dania Achermann (German), Sasha Bozheva (Russian), Rikke Jensen (Faroese and Icelandic), Jiyoun Kim (Korean), Guanie Lim (Chinese and Malay), Sonali Narang (Hindi), Taina Renkonen (Finnish and Swedish), Merete Ryneld Sun (French), Andrea Scassola (Italian), Mila Szolkowska (Polish), Jenine de Vries (Dutch), Atsuko Watanabe (Japanese), and Jessica Whitfield (Spanish).
philsteinberg.wordpress.com 
[…] has been written about Arctic Circle (including, I confess, a bit by me). The gathering was announced a month before the May 2013 Arctic Council minesterial meeting, at […]
[…] from the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission as well as the labour of a small army of translators. With the exception of some of my work in the history of cartography, it’s probably the most […]