The Third Week at KTH; 15–19 June

This series of posts shares field notes from the study abroad course "Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic." The course begins at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then students from the University of Illinois and KTH travel north to conduct research in the Arctic. This blog was originally posted on KTH's Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic webpage.

by Jessica Sellin and Dan Klen

For our third week, we discussed Sami culture, screened several films about Sami history and identity, and visited the Nordiska Museet. Anna Westerstahl-Stenport, Associate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the discussions and film screenings. During the lectures with Anna Westerstahl-Stenport, we learned about Sami culture. This certainly provided a good basis for our understanding of the Sami before the movie screening and visit to the Sami exhibition at the Nordiska Museet.

We learned about the Sami language and how it is verb mobilized rather than noun mobilized, and how this somewhat reflects the Sami lifestyle that emphasizes movement rather than objects. We learned about the pan Sami flag that was introduced in 1986, which has vivid colours influenced by Sami garments (gáhkti) and handicraft as well as the circle in the center representing the circular philosophy of life.

We watched a movie from the Sami webpage www.samer.se, which was supposed to give an introduction to the Sami people. We had a subsequent discussion regarding gender and stereotypes, in which we were critical of the way gender stereotypes perpetuated the male role of reindeer herding. In addition to that, we were concerned about the stereotypical ways in which Sami people are represented, particularly as reindeer herders. We agreed the movie from the Sami website was more similar to an advertisement than a documentary movie aimed for conveying objective information about Sami people and livelihood.

Another film we watched was Sami Nieida Jojk (Sami Daughter yoik), a documentary by Liselotte Wajstedt. The documentary is about a young woman with Sami ancestors; her parents decided not to teach their Sami traditions or language to their daughter. Now she wants to discover the Sami way of living and try to be a part of the Sami community through learning to speak the Sami language, use traditional clothing, and visit Sami festivals. Through camera techniques that made the history viable and personal, Wajstedt displayed her hopes and beliefs on the one hand, and the despairs and lack of faith on the other hand. The documentary rose questions regarding what it means to be a Sami.

At the Nordiska Museet, we focused on the Sápmi exhibition. The exhibition is a mix of media: objects, videos, photography, and text and audio descriptions of the displays. The Museet aims to bring these different media together to give a viewer a holistic story of what it means to be Sami. Clothing, drums, and other objects from Sami cultural history were displayed, and their importance in Sami life communicated through text and audio guides. The exhibition gave us a closer look at the culture we’ve been studying in lectures and how that culture is represented in a cultural institution. Learning more about the Sami prepares us to engage with them in person and become more knowledgeable about their perspectives and values, which is particularly important because we will be heading to Kiruna in less than a week to begin our fieldwork. We ended our tour of the exhibition with a discussion about how the Sami are represented and left the Museet with much to think about as the class goes forward.

The Third Week at KTH; 15–19 June

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Anna Stenport Discusses INSPIRE

INSPIRE, the Illinois-Sweden Program for Educational and Research Exchange, is a program with the goal of establishing a transnational partnership alliance between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) and three leading research universities in Stockholm, Sweden. INSPIRE is funded in part by European Union Center grants, and EUC-affiliated faculty members are at the forefront of the initiative. One affiliated faculty member and an INSPIRE faculty liaison, Anna Westerståhl Stenport, was interviewed for the April 19 edition of Inside Illinois to discuss INSPIRE. Check out the full article below or by clicking here.

by Mike Helenthal

The odds are good you won’t see an umlaut above the university’s legendary “Block-I” logo anytime soon.

But an Urbana campus summit with the leaders of three prestigious Swedish universities April 25-26 shows just how big a partnership with Sweden is becoming.

“It’s innovative and unique,” said Tim Barnes, director of the year-old Illinois Strategic International Partnerships. “There’s never been anything like this; we are looking to build very broad and deep collaborations, sustained over time, of mutual benefits, and which affect all of the core missions of the partner institutions.”

The summit’s origins go back two years, after officials from Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology approached university officials about investigating a mutually beneficial academic partnership.

An agreement was signed and the consortium held a symposium on the Urbana campus in 2010, and a second at KTH last May in Stockholm, attended by a contingent of more than 40 UI faculty members and academic leaders. The effort also led UI leaders to form the Illinois Strategic International Partnerships and its pilot program, INSPIRE, Illinois-Sweden Program for Educational and Research Exchange.

The upcoming summit will continue facilitating the search for identifiable, cross-disciplinary collaborations, but it also could lay the foundation for an expansion of the INSPIRE partnership to include two of Sweden’s other prestigious universities, Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet.

Leaders of the two institutions, which already have extensive collaborations with KTH in strategic areas, also will participate in the symposium, as will civic leaders invited from both countries.

“They are basically the CEOs of these universities and it’s very unusual to have them all together in the same place,” Barnes said.

Mirror images

Barnes said adding the institutions to the consortium would broaden its academic reach and round out the partnership, considering Stockholm University features comprehensive liberal arts, natural science, law and education programs, and Karolinska Institutet is a world-class medical research and teaching university.

“We see great opportunities that align with campus priorities,” Barnes said. “We’re all looking at the same science questions and it makes great sense to look at some of these things together.”

In all, the Swedish three-campus footprint is very comparable to the UI structure, with 70,000 students and a broad realm of academic and research activity. 

“The (April) symposium is all about trying to foster those interconnections,” Barnes said, noting that higher-education research partnerships normally form at the personal level – an inherent weakness that makes them difficult to sustain over time. He said that’s why university officials have worked so hard to ensure the Swedish partnership – and others in the future – goes beyond one-to-one contacts and becomes integrated throughout the institution.

“It takes the will and desire of the individual faculty and departments to make those connections really happen,” he said. “Then it’s a matter of corralling them and pulling them all together. By pooling our limited resources we can do much bigger things. It becomes mutually beneficial if you do it right.”

Urbana Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise said partnerships such as the one with Swedish education leaders are tantamount to sustaining the UI’s world-renown reputation.

“These types of partnerships can have an almost exponential effect,” Wise said. “And not only do they lead to new relationships and research that produce new and innovative ideas and partnerships, they create answers.”

Beyond the obvious academic benefits, the defined partnership with Sweden’s top universities presents cost-saving, economy of scale opportunities and a regional presence with a European Union member, Wise said.

“Our future as a top-tier research university depends on maintaining global pre-eminence in an ever-changing competitive environment,” she said. “That can only be achieved by reaching out, discovering new opportunities and then adding our footprints.”

Barnes said the partnership is further enhanced by the fact that Sweden has a high population of English speakers. The country also is ranked among the highest in the world for its investment in research and development (as a percentage of gross domestic product) and the number of citizens who hold doctoral degrees, on a per capita basis.

“We’re looking at the INSPIRE alliance as a kind of gateway to Europe,” he said. “The university hasn’t had a go-to partnership like this that can take advantage of connections within the European Union.”

Teams approach

Collaborations between researchers at the two institutions started forming prior to the first meeting, according to two Urbana professors serving as faculty liaisons and involved with the INSPIRE process since its inception.

In fact, already there are more than two dozen collaborative projects being conducted between UI and Stockholm researchers alone. One of the projects with the most immediate impact is a joint interdisciplinary and co-taught class on the Arctic and climate change. The class is being offered at KTH over the summer.

The course, co-taught by a multidisciplinary team of Illinois and KTH faculty members, will provide UI students from a variety of programs with a well-rounded, multifaceted consideration of climate change and its effects on the Arctic, culminating with an up-front view through fieldwork in the Arctic circle, at a facility in the Svalbard archipelago.

Another new project has teamed researchers of the Illinois Rail Transportation and Engineering Center with the KTH Railway Group. The partnership led to a workshop last November and eventually could aid in the development of a federally proposed high-speed rail system in Illinois.

“A core feature of the two previous strategic research symposia was the comprehensive engagement across multiple colleges, schools and faculties, including engineering, natural and social sciences, arts and the humanities,” said Anna Westerståhl Stenport, a professor of Germanic languages and literatures and the director of the UI’s Scandinavian Program, who is currently on sabbatical at Stanford University.

She said those engagement possibilities will continue to be actively pursued at the April summit.

“Sweden and the U.S. both have a lot to gain from close collaboration in higher education,” she said. “INSPIRE is another way for faculty and students to gain access to more resources and help provide additional opportunities for global impact and significance. We know our Swedish partners see the partnership as a reciprocal opportunity to collaborate with a top U.S. research institution.”

Harry Dankowicz, a Cannon Faculty Scholar in mechanical science and engineering, a professor in the UI’s Information Trust Institute and a graduate of KTH, said he could see from the first meeting between the institutions that great things would arise from it.

“It became clear from the initial handshake that there was a natural match here,” he said. “Although one might have been content with a narrowly defined exchange agreement, that wasn’t the final destination of this partnership.”

One particularly innovative feature of the partnership, he said, is the integration of the core missions of the four universities: education, research, public engagement and economic development.

“By attending to the interest of all our stakeholders, namely students, faculty and the commercial and civic societies of the state of Illinois and Sweden, we aim to build an alliance that can provide global leadership in higher education, research collaboration and civic engagement,” Dankowicz said. “The upcoming April summit is an opportunity to bring these strategic components of the partnership into focus.”

Stenport said she sees a positive trajectory in the partnership as it gains momentum.

“The partnership is already adding value on campus,” she said. “Next steps will be to implement it as a valuable alliance across many different disciplinary areas. There is the potential to have a critical impact on the issues facing both countries, as well as the entire world.”

Anna Stenport Discusses INSPIRE

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Nordic Exposure

EU Center-affiliated faculty member Anna Stenport and many others at UI are developing the Illinois-Sweden Program for Educational Research Exchange (INSPIRE) partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and additional collaborators in Sweden. The partnership emerged in part with EUC support and hosting of a delegation from the Swedish embassy, including the Swedish ambassador, for EU Day 2009.

This article originally appeared in College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) News, University of Illinois, May 2011, and was authored by Dave Evensen.
 

After a long winter you may shudder to hear this, but much learning remains to be done in the lands of ice and snow. Thanks to a budding partnership at the University of Illinois, however, that task is getting more exciting, and it leads through Sweden.

Researchers and educators across campus are expecting valuable opportunities to rise from a trans-Atlantic collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm that has roots in the College of LAS. The partnership, which has been forming rapidly during the past several months, will allow Illinois to share expertise with a part of the world where studies in energy, humanities, information and communications, materials, medicine and biotechnology, and transportation are highly advanced.

The partnership, named Illinois-Sweden Program for Educational Research Exchanged (INSPIRE), could also provide Illinois researchers and students with a new access point to the Arctic Circle, making for chilly but beneficial study-abroad and research possibilities.

“Even with the University of Illinois’s comprehensive educational and academic programs, there is relatively little taught at Illinois and relatively little research pursued that pertains to northern-most Europe,” says Anna Stenport, professor of Scandinavian studies and one of the chief organizers of INSPIRE.

“One of the motivators for me has been to increase knowledge of and exposure to the Nordic region for the University of Illinois student population and also its faculty researchers,” she adds. Stenport, a native of Sweden, has worked closely with Harry Dankowicz, professor of mechanical science and engineering, and who also hails from Sweden, to pull the partnership together.

The partnership began somewhat fortuitously in 2009 when a delegation from the Swedish embassy, including the Swedish ambassador, visited the U of I campus. Later, when KTH made known that they wanted to partner with institutions in the United States, a Swedish embassy staff member, who had visited campus during the 2009 visit, suggested Illinois.

Once the connection occurred, the idea grew, with collaboration amongst the Colleges of LAS, Engineering, Fine and Applied Arts, Media, and the Graduate College, along with the Chancellor’s office, International Programs and Studies, European Union Center, and Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. In December 2010, KTH sent a delegation for a symposium at Illinois, and another symposium is scheduled this month in Stockholm to organize the effort.

Organizers hope the partnership will grow to include other educational institutions across northern Europe. Bruce Fouke, professor of geology and microbiology, recently received a research fellowship from Lund University in Lund, Sweden, and he believes INSPIRE is a “perfect” model for what he and other researchers are trying to achieve in Scandinavia.

“Sweden is traditionally a powerhouse in the natural sciences and they’ve just made some recent nationwide commitments to get seriously involved with space exploration,” Fouke says.
Through the partnership, Fouke, Stenport, Dankowicz, and others have been planning an Arctic field course that involves studying everything from microbial life to environmental change to the cultures of indigenous communities.

“We had this instant catalysis of interest due to major initiatives both in the U.S. and Sweden that were naturals to work together,” Fouke says. “And I think this is going to lay many years of very dynamic initiatives—both research and teaching—between our campus and Sweden.”

Nordic Exposure

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