UK-Nordic Mobility: Tracing Flows and Building Networks
Encouraging collaboration between academics, museum and heritage studies, and migrant communities to explore how mobility has affected the identities of the UK and the Nordic region.
5 October 2019
Rooted in the belief (supported by recent trends in Migration Studies) that all types of migration should be examined, including those between what today might be regarded as ‘privileged’ regions, the project aimed to focus on the migrant communities (particularly as represented by local multicultural heritage groups and institutions), the movement of objects, texts, ideas and images and the multilingual environment triggered by these flows. By studying these movements both from a historical and contemporary perspective, the project sought to contribute to the understanding of migration, integration and heritage, favouring the creation of plural societies at a time when mobility is challenged.
Through an online two-day conference, the project encouraged collaboration and discussion between the academy, heritage communities and non-academic audiences (both the migrant communities at the centre of the project and the wider societies of which they are part). The conference brought together researchers from several disciplines (such as Area Studies, Linguistics, Sociology and Visual Culture) in order to explore how mobility has affected the identities of the UK and the Nordic region from the nineteenth century onwards.
Ultimately this was with the aim of setting up the UK-Nordic Mobility Network, a consortium of universities and organisations in the UK and Nordic countries mapping the movements of people, ideas and texts between the UK and the Nordic countries and reflecting on the construction and preservation of individual, national and multinational identities in these regions.
In addition, the project also launched an online exhibition Nordic Fragments, featuring objects from UCL Collections which tell stories of UK-Nordic Mobility.
The exhibition is divided in three main sections which broadly work as umbrella categories for the items gathered so far: landscapes and communities, translation and remediation, research and teaching. Items featured so far are part of two renowned UCL collections: UCL Art Museum (UCL Culture) and UCL Special Collections (UCL Library Services). The exhibition has been curated by Dr Elettra Carbone and designed by Dr Essi Viitanen.
This exhibition aims at focusing on the ‘fragments’, namely a selection of materials from UCL Collections ranging from unpublished nineteenth-century engravings of Norwegian landscapes to papers relating to the Scandinavian visits of former UCL members of staff, from the original drawings of Danish Golden-Age painters to entire rare book collections.
While the items featured so far focus mostly on Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), there is hope to expand the focus to all the Nordic region in time. Work on this exhibition is ongoing and more items will be added in the coming years as we unearth them and progressively regain access to archives following closures in Covid-19 lockdown periods.