Keynotes

Keynote speakers for NGM 2022 Joensuu

Human Geography

Tim Cresswell is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He is a cultural geographer by training, and the author or editor of a dozen books and over a 100 articles on the role of space, place and mobility in social and cultural life. He has PhDs in Geography (Wisconsin) and Creative Writing (Royal Holloway, University of London). Cresswell is also a widely published poet with three collections – most recently Plastiglomerate (Penned in the Margins, 2020) which is long listed for the Laurel Prize in eco-poetry. His most recent academic book, Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place was published in 2019 by the University of Chicago Press. Cresswell is the founding co-editor of the journal GeoHumanities. https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/tim-cresswell

Josefina Syssner is Associate Professor in Human Geography and Head of the Department of Culture and Society, Linkoping University, Sweden.
Her research interests span a broad field, including local politics, planning, and development, primarily in remote and rural areas in the Nordic countries. She combines a theoretical interest in how conceptualisations of space and place inform policy development and policy dynamics with a concern over how academic knowledge can be made more accessible to politicians and planners at all levels. Her recent research addresses rural depopulation and demographic decline from a critical policy perspective. In her latest book, Pathways to Demographic Adaptation: Perspectives on Policy and Planning in Depopulating Areas in Northern Europe (Springer Nature), Syssner assesses the potential of demographic adaptation policies to manage depopulation. https://liu.se/en/employee/jossu73

Carolin Schurr is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Geography of the Department of Geography at the University of Bern, Switzerland. As a feminist geographer her research agenda explores how globalisation processes penetrate the most intimate fields of our lives. In her research, she advances feminist theories at the crossroad of the body, the intimate and the global by experimenting with and developing creative affectual methods in collaboration with artists. Her recent research questions how access to reproductive technologies becomes geopolitical when states, international organizations, transnational corporations, and religious and nongovernmental organizations define and contest whose bodies count as desirable for reproduction and whose bodies are denied reproduction or restricted in it. Her co-authored paper on “Assemblage Thinking and Actor-Network Theory: Conjunctions, Disjunctions, Cross-Fertilisations” has been among the most downloaded papers in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers since its publication in 2016 and her paper on the Affective Economy of Transnational Surrogacy has won the Ashby Prize by the Journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space in 2019. She is a feminist activist and mother of three children. https://www.geography.unibe.ch/research/social_and_cultural_geography/index_eng.html

Physical Geography

Lina Polvi Sjöberg is Associate Professor at the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science at Umeå University, Sweden.
Her research aims to determine natural geomorphic and ecological processes in northern Sweden to guide stream restoration and post-restoration recovery. She often works in interdisciplinary projects, examining how geomorphology affect biota and ecological processes and how ecosystem engineers affect geomorphic processes and form. Currently, her research revolves around understanding drivers of channel form and sediment transport in semi-alluvial boulder-bed streams in northern Fennoscandia through flume studies, field studies of sediment transport, and cutting-edge techniques of environmental seismology. Polvi Sjöberg’s research has practical applications for stream restoration and she collaborates with multiple government agencies in monitoring restoration results and advising restoration activities.
https://www.umu.se/en/staff/lina-polvi/

Benjamin Burkhard is Professor of Physical Geography and Director of the Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.
A geographer and landscape ecologist teaching and working with transdisciplinary human-environmental system analyses in various national and international R&D projects, his main research focus is on landscape ecology, landscape structures and process analyses, mapping of ecosystem service supply and demand, and applications in environmental management. He is Co-Chair of the Ecosystem Services Partnership ESP and Vice President of the International Association of Landscape Ecology IALE. Burkhard is editor-in-chief of the One Ecosystem – Ecology and Sustainability Data Journal and, besides co-editing the book Mapping Ecosystem Services (Pensoft Publishers), his publications include nine edited journal Special Issues.
https://www.phygeo.uni-hannover.de/burkhard.html?&L=1