Gender, Youth and the Arctic: A Conversation with Anna Mjöll Guðmundsdóttir

PhD student in Geography, University of Iceland · ArcticKnows project

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Why Look at the Arctic Through a Gender Lens?

My research asks how gender and the environment shape each other, and how that relationship in turn shapes knowledge and the regenerative economy across ArcticKnows’ pilot sites. Rather than applying methods from the outside, I work directly with local stakeholders: co-producing knowledge together, mostly through conversations and shared stories.

I have until now focused mostly on the gender aspect, but I will be focusing on the youth aspect as well. I have been focusing on topics like feminist ecology, ethics of care, gender justice and indigenous feminist discourses, where Indigenous relational knowing and being provide an alternative to paradigms prioritizing individualism and extraction, offering potentially transformative insights into contemporary issues like environmental conservation, community resilience, and social justice.

What I find interesting is how Scandinavian foreign policy regarding gender equality has been criticized for its neo-liberal tendencies that prioritizes economic growth and individualism, while issues regarding indigeneity, intersectionality, and other spheres of life than the labour market have been greatly neglected. In this regard it is interesting to note that the so-called female-dominated sectors are less valued than the typically male-dominated ones.

Assessments of issues such as climate change on rural and indigenous communities in the Arctic have had a strong male bias, where emphasis has been on primary effects on fishing, hunting etc. Focus on other genders, as well as youth perspectives, have been missing. Less focus has been on secondary effects such as social consequences with changes in lifestyles in the last decades, where the loss of traditional lifestyles and out-migration of women and youth have impacted indigenous and rural people’s sense of identity.

It is also interesting that gender research has mostly focused on female, and more recently on queer and non-binary, issues, but much less research has been on male issues. Gender equality research shows that although there is still considerable inequality between men and women when it comes to economic prosperity, young indigenous men suffer more from mental health issues in rural areas because of conflicts in land-use, resource extraction and negative effects of on-going colonialism. Another issue related to gender is questions regarding security and insecurity, as genders experience insecurities differently.

Insecurities in Arctic rural areas are amplified with rapid socio environmental changes, where women experience stress due to a dual role as caregivers and wage earners, and because of on-going inequalities and imbalances between centre and periphery areas, where rural areas have witnessed loss of various services and support.

Why does this matter for ArcticKnows and its stakeholders?

The objective of the project research is to define and map the regenerative potential of the local communities, economies and ecosystems, and come up with recommendations on how to increase such potential. In my research I focus on defining and mapping the roles of, and impact on, women and youth in the pilot areas regarding empowerment, participation and regenerative economy. The aim is to co-create knowledge with the local stakeholders for a more inclusive policy making.

In the coming months I will focus on both literature review and data collection. We have and will continue to facilitate sharing circles with locals in their communities in the respective pilot areas. This is part of narrative centred approaches where we co-create knowledge with the local stakeholders, to better understand their lived experiences, concerns and agency in responding to their own, the communities’ and environmental needs for the future.

Any early observations from the pilot sites?

The early observations that I have found most interesting are the locals’ emphasis on social connections, rather than or not only on economic growth. This relates directly to the ethics of care theories and indigenous feminism critique of the neo-liberal Nordic state feminism.

The out-migration of women and young people from rural areas is an issue.

“The communities die if the needs of women and children are not met.”

The shift from a strong welfare state to a more neo-liberal capitalistic system is a big issue. There are however a lot of things that the locals (in the Swedish pilot area) are very proud of and that benefit them, for example the exemplary Swedish welfare system, which provides both mothers and fathers with 18 months of shared paid parental leave.

In the pilot area in Sweden, like in most rural areas in the Arctic, there is a lot of uncertainty in smaller communities related to centre-periphery power relations. The locals lack a guarantee that they will get the social support they need, including a lack of, and diminishing, basic services such as closing of schools, children having to travel long distances to go to school, and added uncertainty related to climate changes on weather conditions and bad roads, especially during the winter.

What I found moving was the emphasis of the locals in the communities we visited on how they really care about each other, and how each member of the community matters. It was interesting to discover how conflicts over land-use and extractive industries, such as dams and windmill farms, are a source of uncertainties, but also a very dividing and polarising issue for small communities that might not recover from often unnecessary debates about land-use development decisions.

Schools are vital and central to keeping local knowledge alive, and that is why it is extremely important to strengthen the school system and not diminish service for children and young people. The communities and labour market are still highly gender segregated, with most teachers at schools being women.

What was interesting was the obvious stress related to work-life balance, and how difficult it is for young mothers to navigate a full-time job, full-time studies to get “the right” degree, while raising young children as well as participating in politics on a municipality level, all at the same time.

Here is a quote from a local that sums up local issues.

“They should prioritize and try to make it possible for people to stay. That could be a lot more systematic. Closing the school would kill the town.”

What I love about this project is being a part of this network of both locals and scientists, co-creating local knowledge that will hopefully have an impact on decision making within the European Union regarding rural areas in the Arctic.