The Most Pressing Issues of our Time are Interdisciplinary

“Inaction in the Arctic could increase the speed of global climate change. The time to act is now.” These are words from students at the Master level course “A Changing Arctic” who were challenged to reflect on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals during their course at UiO’s International Summer School. The course has not only gone innovative ways in integrating the SDGs into the curriculum, but also illustrates the benefits of academic interdisciplinarity. Soon, the course will be made accessible globally in the form of a MOOC (a Massive Open Online course).

Image may contain: Sky, Smile, Cloud, People in nature, Snow.

Dr. Grace Shephard onboard the icebreaker Oden during a scientific expedition to the central Arctic Ocean, which also involved data collection related to Canada’s extended continental shelf claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Shephard is a founding member of APECS Norway (The Association for Polar Early Career Scientists) and a co-representative for Norway on the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC).

By Oda Davanger

Published Oct. 12, 2021

Most master-level courses at the International Summer School at UiO are interdisciplinary, and they often revolve around central questions pertaining to world peace and global justice. Course leader for “A Changing Arctic” Dr.?Grace Shephardsays that when studying the Arctic, no single discipline is expansive enough to really capture the dynamics and feedbacks of this region.?

— The Arctic is something everyone has an interest in, whether or not they know that themselves, says Shephard. —States, international organizations and private interests, including emerging economies in Asia, now show a keen interest in the High North and the Arctic at large.?Anything on the poles and the Arctic is inherently interdisciplinary. With the former director of my institute, Professor Carmen Gaina, we have brought together people from natural science, law, led by Professor Alla Podznakova (UiO), and humanities, led by Professor Elana Wilson Rowe (NUPI) (earlier Professor Olav Schram Stokke, UiO) in this course. It is a unique course because it involves three different faculties and many disciplines.

Shephard taught the master-level course?“A Changing Arctic”?this year for the first time since 2018. Due to the pandemic, the course was redesigned into a digital format.?

Anything but Ahistoric

Image may contain: Photograph, Travel, Art, Natural landscape, Collage. — Collage illustrating typical notions of the Arctic and additional realities, both present and historical, in the Arctic and high north (images; Unsplash, IBRU, Arctic Council).

Shephard is a researcher in geology and geophysics at the?Center for Earth Evolution and Dynamics, hosted at the department of Geosciences at the University of Oslo. One of the course’s central questions is the contrast between what the Arctic typically references in peoples’ minds, and elements that are necessarily involved in any thorough study of the region.

The title of the course,?“A Changing Arctic”?already implies a historical perspective.?

— In terms of long-term average, the temper