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Canadian Studies Center, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

FLAS Fellow published in Arctic Yearbook

Ellen Ahlness, left, with Elizabeth Wessells, doctoral student, Anthropology, at the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Canada offices in Ottawa, Canada in January 2020. Photo credit: Nadine Fabbi.

March 20, 2020

Ellen Ahlness, FLAS Fellow in Inuktitut and doctoral student in political science was just published in 2019 Arctic Yearbook.

 Ellen’s paper, “Incompatible Futures: Frontier Nostalgia and Southern Discourses of the Arctic,” argues that social attitudes towards the Arctic are often shaped by nostalgia that can influence even how policy is shaped; and that this nostalgia is often informed by the settler-colonial attitudes of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ellen is a doctoral student with the UW Department of Political Science. Her thesis addresses the growing role of the Indigenous Permanent Participants on the Arctic Council. She is also an Arctic Fellow with the Jackson School’s International Policy Institute. In late January she served as a graduate assistant for the 2020 Task Force on the Arctic that took nine Jackson School majors to Ottawa for a one-week research trip. Ellen is a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Inuktitut (2018-19 and 2019-20). She studies with Alexina Kublu, former Language Commissioner of Nunavut, who teaches Inuktitut to UW students via Skype.