TAI Bookshelf Podcast - Making and Unmaking Reindeer with Corinna Röver
Dr. Corinna Röver in the Swedish Arctic. Photo: Corinna Röver
Your favourite Arctic podcast is back for its third series! As always, co-hosts Liubov Timonina, Romain Chuffart and Saga Helgason chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. Tune in every month and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.
In this episode, Liuba and Romain had a conversation with Dr. Corinna Röver about the evolution of the cultural and social meanings of reindeer throughout modern history. This conversation was based on Corinna’s doctoral thesis titled “Making Reindeer: The Negotiation of an Arctic Animal in Modern Swedish Sápmi, 1920-2020” which she recently defended at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Throughout the conversation, Corinna talked about the history of the ideas, discourses and practices that shaped the modern reindeer as both a social and political symbol. Through the lens of environmental history, Corinna reflects on the unequal power dynamic between the Swedish state and Sápmi, and how the ideas of what reindeer is and ought to be played a major role in political and legal negotiations of Sami sovereignty and land rights. Romain, Liuba, and Corinna also explored discursive and social challenges of rethinking sovereignty and food security from a Sami perspective.
Dr. Corinna Röver is a visiting Postdoc at the University of Oulu. She holds a PhD in the history of science, technology and environment from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is especially interested in historical human-animal studies and the Arctic humanities. Apart from tracing animals and their stories in dusty archives, Corinna served as board member and secretary general in APECS Sweden during her time at KTH. Prior to her PhD, Corinna studied Global Studies in Leipzig and Vienna and was a Fulbright scholar at UC Santa Barbara.
References and further readings:
- Röver, Corinna. “Making Reindeer: The Negotiation of an Arctic Animal in Modern Swedish Sápmi, 1920-2020.” PhD diss., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2021.
- Fakhri, Michael. “Third World Sovereignty, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Food Sovereignty: Living with Sovereignty despite the Map.” Transnational Legal Theory 9, no. 3-4 (2018): 218–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/20414005.2018.1563748.
- Demuth, Bathsheba. “More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in Chukotka and Alaska.” Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments (2013): 174-94.
This episode was recorded in September 2021.