Nuuk

This article explores the emergence of Greenland as an Anthropocene island through anthropological fieldwork in and around the decommissioned Nalunaq goldmine in the south of the country. The article takes off from the idea that Anthropocene activities are characterized by the invention, movement, and marketing of seemingly mobile resource units that can be identified and invested in regardless of landscape specificities, and explores how the production of Greenlandic gold complicates this idea of extraction. In particular, the article discusses how Greenlandic post-colonial independence and ambitions for mining both go together and undermine each other, creating new dependencies and relationalities along the way. Through analyzing parts of Nalunaq’s political context, infrastructural challenges, the gold that came out, and eventual closure, the article presents Greenlandic gold mining as a set of partly congruous, partly contradictory practices and ideas. The article thus specifies...

Both islands and cities are often conceptualized in terms of centre-periphery relationships. Scholarly attempts to nuance popular associations of islands with peripherality and cities with centrality reflect awareness of underlying power relationships. Drawing upon island studies and urban studies knowledge, the case of Nuuk, Greenland, is used to explore how centring and peripheralizing processes play out in an island city. Greenland as a whole came to be regarded as a peripheral region under Danish colonialism, but since the 1950s, Danes and Greenlanders have sought to transform Greenland into its own centre. Nuuk grew into a city and a political, administrative and economic centre relative to Greenland’s small settlements, which came to be seen as central to Greenlandic culture. Nuuk’s rapid growth – dependent on imported Danish designs, materials, technologies, policies and labour – has resulted in an island city of immense contrasts, with monumental modern buildings standing al...

Working towards an anthropology of nursing, I explore what it means to become and be an Inuit nurse, using as a lens the experiences and voices of Greenlandic and Canadian Inuit nurses and nursing students who are educated and practice in settings developed and governed by Southerners (Danes and EuroCanadians), functioning largely on Southern cultural norms (Danish and EuroCanadian), in Southern languages (Danish and English). I argue that Inuit nurses and students are the Arctic health care systems’ most valuable assets. They offer unique knowledge, qualifications, and spirit to the Arctic health care systems while being affected by health care politics, a lack of permanent health care staff and high turnover rates. These challenges are compounded by Inuit nurses’ and students’ need to negotiate the languages and cultures of the nursing field, the Southern systems and their Southern colleagues, with the languages and cultures of the patients, their families, and the societies from ...

Island studies has developed into an established, interdisciplinary research field. It is important that island studies not only continue deepening its internal theoretical understandings but also reach out to other fields and regions that have received limited attention within island studies. It is also necessary for island studies to grapple with a number of problematic tendencies within the field and the wider scholarship, including by challenging the misuse of island spatiality to produce idealised visions of islands (for example in island sustainability research). Similarly, it is important to pursue a decolonial island studies that rethinks the ways in which island development research can end up marginalising Indigenous voices at the same time as it seeks to understand islands 'on their own terms'. Island studies, many say, is an emerging field. We live in an age that valorises dynamism and change, so it flatters our sensibilities to participate in a scholarly project that is not fixed, fusty, or static. If island studies is emerging, then we who contribute to it are at the vanguard, engaging in a new way of doing research. But this mantra of 'emergence', 'burgeoning', 'growth', 'institutionalisation' is also an apology―repeated across a range of important literature reviews and theoretical texts (e.g.,

Both islands and cities are often conceptualized in terms of centre-periphery relationships. Scholarly attempts to nuance popular associations of islands with peripherality and cities with centrality reflect awareness of underlying power relationships. Drawing upon island studies and urban studies knowledge, the case of Nuuk, Greenland, is used to explore how centring and peripheralizing processes play out in an island city. Greenland as a whole came to be regarded as a peripheral region under Danish colonialism, but since the 1950s, Danes and Greenlanders have sought to transform Greenland into its own centre. Nuuk grew into a city and a political, administrative and economic centre relative to Greenland’s small settlements, which came to be seen as central to Greenlandic culture. Nuuk’s rapid growth – dependent on imported Danish designs, materials, technologies, policies and labour – has resulted in an island city of immense contrasts, with monumental modern buildings standing alongside dilapidated 1960s apartment blocks and with strongly differentiated neighbourhoods. Nuuk is both at the centre and on the periphery, enmeshed in power relationships with other Greenlandic settlements and with Denmark. Nuuk is a result of urban design processes that are conditioned by both infrastructural systems and a confluence of spatio-temporal factors.