Dina is a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium. She is currently working on several projects, ranging from one on embodied understanding of place (Trapper’s Cabin Project in NW Svalbard); one on the intersection between embodied/mediated understandings of place and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in Svalbard, Iceland and Greenland; and a case study on DRR in Svalbard for the ‘Navigating the New Arctic’ project funded by the National Science Foundation. Dina is particularly interested in using an identity-of-place framework and visual methods of in-quiry.
- In 2022, Dina received the Rachel Tanur Memorial Visual Sociology Award.
- In 2023, Dina was awarded a Grímsson Fellowship to conduct work in Iceland.
Reading List
My reading is rather eclectic and I often find myself following multiple threads simultaneously. That said, a few books and articles have stood out and continue to be works I refer to and go back to. Donna Haraway’s 1988 article on situated perspectives was one of those. I particularly liked the idea of trying to work with multiple perspectives at the same time. This idea has been fundamental to my identity-of-place approach. Another book that made a lasting impression on me was Doreen Massey’s ‘For Space’. Here, I especially liked her notion that how we conceive of space (place etc.) impacts how we move through it / interact with it. In addition, I really appreciated Bjørnar Olsen’s ‘In Defense of Things’ and the way in which he encourages us to re-think the nature of things and their ‘thingness,’ de-centering the human in our approach to materiality.
Other books that I have found important for working in an Arctic context are Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s ‘Decolonizing Methodologies’ and Margaret Kovach’s ‘Indigenous Methodologies: Char-acteristics, Conversations, and Contexts’. These books have helped me to question my own, situ-ated, approach to research and to re-think ways of working in various contexts.
A relatively new interest for me has to do with how our experiment-based approach, with ‘matters of fact,’ came into being. I am currently reading books such as: ‘Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life’ by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer and ‘The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick’ by Jessica Riskin.
All of these books look into how we think and question our ways of knowledge making and the situatedness of perception. And it is that, ultimately, which I always find fascinating and keep coming back to.
- Haraway, Donna (1988). ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privi-lege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14:3 (575-599).
- Kovach, Margaret (reprint 2010) Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. University of Toronto Press.
- Massey, Doreen. (2005). For Space. SAGE Publications Ltd.
- Olsen, Bjørnar (reprint 2013). In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Al-taMira Press.
- Riskin, Jessica (reprint 2018). The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick. University of Chicago Press.
- Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer (revised edition 2017). Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton University Press.
- Tuhiwai Smith, Linda (2nd edition 2012). Decolonizing Methodologies. Zed Books Ltd.
Thematic Network on Critical Arctic Studies 