North
Meets North
The First NRF in Akureyri and Bessastadir, Iceland,
4-6 November 2000
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There were 111 people, 62 males and 49 females, who participated in the first
Northern Research Forum in
Akureyri on November 4 - 6, 2000. They included
17 from Russia, Finland 13, Iceland 31, Canada 20, Norway 8, USA 10, Denmark
2, UK 3, Sweden 3, Greenland 3, and Latvia 1. Participants included politicians,
business leaders, civil servants, community leaders, resource managers,
scientists, graduate students and educators.
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Twenty-three
young researchers actively participated in the congress.
The president
of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, also Chairman of the NRF
Honorary Board, opened the Forum in Akureyri with an address,
which was followed by the presentations of Pekka Aikio, President
of the Saami Parliament of Finland; Amalie Jessen, Vice-Director
of Greenland Department of Industry; Peter Johnson, Canadian
Council of Science and Technology Advisors; and Sergey Kharuchi,
Chair of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the
North. The five panel sessions that followed focused respectively
on: The relevance of history to contemporary issues of peace
and security; Northern economies in the global economy; Regionalism
and governance; Implementation of the Northern Dimension, and
Science and technology applications in the north.
The North Meets
North proceedings include most of the panel presentations from
the 1st NRF Open Meeting, i.e. the opening session and five
theme-related sessions. It also contains all of the background
essays specifically written for the 1st Open Meeting by people
prominent in Northern issues from a variety of backgrounds.
These invited position papers, which were released to participants
in advance of the event, speak to a specific theme while they
also address the question of opportunities for, and the barriers
to, research in the circumpolar north. About twenty young researchers,
most of them Ph.D. students, presented at the Forum during
the "Open Square Hours" held after each regular panel session. The chapter called "Voices of Young Researchers" includes four of these presentations, dealing with different conference themes.
The 1st NRF
closed with a Summary Session hosted by Olafur Ragnar Grimsson,
president of Iceland, and was held at his residency, Bessastaðir.
Here, a representative group of young researchers presented
their impressions of the former panel sessions to the entire
group of Forum participants. A constructive dialogue followed,
when the future of the NRF was discussed and the decision was
made to hold the second Open Meeting in northwest Russia or
Finland. Consequently and upon its meeting in Quebec City,
May 2001, the Steering Committee of the NRF accepted a formal
invitation from the city of Veliky Novgorod to host the second
NRF.
The proceedings
of the first NRF, North Meets North, have been published in
English. This book can be accessed on www.nrf.is. For obtaining
hard copies of the book, please contact the NRF secretariat
at nrf@unak.is.
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