Mirja Hiltunen

Mirja Hiltunen (Doctor of Art, MEd ) is professor of Art Education in the Faculty of Art and design, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland and adjunct professor in University of Oulu. She has devised a performative art strategy as part of her work in art teacher education and has been leading community-based art education projects in Lapland for twenty years.  The place-specificity, performativity and socially engaged art are particular interests to her.  She has presented numerous international research papers and published her work in art education journals and books and art exhibitions. She is with professors Timo Jokela, and Glen Coutts the leader of Northern Art, Community and Environment Research group (NACER) in which visual art education and applied visual arts are researched and developed in a Northern context (https://nacerteam.weebly.com). 

Aubyn O’Grady

Aubyn O’Grady is the Program Director of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Territory, Dawson City, Yukon. 

Aubyn’s interdisciplinary academic and art works exist in the space between performance and pedagogy. Community engagement is the focus of her arts practice, often taking up the very place she lives in as her material. She is a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator, and so, can rarely take sole credit for any project she organizes. However, she can be credited with conceptualizing the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers (2013-2017), the Swimming Lessons Aquatic Lecture series (2017-2018), Local Field School (2020+), and Drawlidays (2019, 2020), a Dawson City-wide portrait exchange. Aubyn is also a PhD candidate in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. 

Ebbe Volquardsen

Ebbe Volquardsen is an Associate Professor of Cultural History and Chair of the Department of Cultural and Social History at Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland in Nuuk. Originally from Germany, his academic background is in cultural anthropology, Scandinavian studies, and political science. His work thus represents an interdisciplinary approach. He has been working on the cultural history of Greenland and enduring colonial legacies in its relationship with Denmark for years, including analyses of historiography, representations in literature, film, and arts, public discourse, and more recent political implications. His research interests include images of Nordic colonialism in the North Atlantic and in the Global South as part of a more general figure of thought that generates narratives of exceptionality. Furthermore, he has been focusing on politics of remembrance, nationalism, processes of political and mental decolonization and reconciliation, and colonialism’s aftermaths in both the former colony and metropolis.