Gry Paulgaard

Gry Paulgaard is Dr.Polit. in Pedagogics and Professor emeritus at the Department of Teacher Education & Pedagogics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Northern Norway, campus Tromsø.

Her scholarly interests include geography of education; implying the importance of contextualization of educational research, globalization and uneven development between center and periphery; particularly focusing on how young people growing up in northern areas live their lives, experience their opportunities for education and work, and the ‘choices’ they have.

In recent years, after 2015, much of her research has focused on migration, refugee education and integration of young people and families in rural places, particularly in the rural north of Norway. She is also the head of the research group ICred – Intercultural Relations in Education – at UiT the Arctic University of Norway.

Laura Robson

Laura Robson is Professor in the Department of History and the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. She is a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in questions of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness.

With Jennifer Dueck, she is a co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org, a digital humanities project exploring the varied and multifaceted experiences of statelessness in the modern era. 

Pedagogy in Times of Crisis: Refugees in the Nordic Areas, Navigating in New Landscapes.

Gry Paulgaard

Preliminary abstract

Paulgaard’s research interests included globalization, center-periphery dynamics, geography of education, and cultural identities. In autumn 2015, when refugees from 35 nations arrived in a northern Norwegian municipality via the Arctic Migration Route, she began studying their resettlement experiences. These refugees crossed Europe’s northernmost Schengen border, the border between Russia and northern Norway. This Arctic Migration Route, situated above the 69th parallel north, offered an alternative to the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossings for those seeking safety and protection.

Her speech will explore how refugees navigate new and often unfamiliar landscapes, emphasizing the role of education, local practices, and collective memories. By integrating theories of place-based experiences with phenomenology of practice, she will highlight the local impact of global conflicts in northern regions. Drawing on interviews with refugee families, young people, local authorities, teachers, and volunteers, she will discuss the sensory and emotional aspects of resettlement, including feelings of orientation and disorientation, and how place-based experiences, climate, and culture influence refugee integration in new environments.

Based on collaboration with her Danish colleague, Dr. Lisa Herslund, she will demonstrate that despite several differences between Norwegian and Danish rural areas in terms of distance, climate, and population density, the experiences of young refugees reveal surprisingly many similarities. This collaboration opened opportunities to analyze how differences are shaped through lived practice, producing ‘contradictions of space’ for people settling in new landscapes.

Laura Robson

Abstract comes soon