CENES Undergraduate Research Symposium 2026

For much of its history as a Danish colony, access to Greenland was strictly controlled by the Konglige Grønlandske Handel (Royal Greenlandic Trading Company, KGH), limiting who could travel to, or otherwise directly interact with Greenland to those sanctioned by Danish colonial authorities. As such, most Danes’ impressions of Greenland were mediated by its portrayal by those who were granted the opportunity to spend time in Greenland.

This thesis will analyse some of these portrayals which took visual form, from the 1870s to 1940s, the period when it was most common for Danish artists to travel to Greenland in order to represent it visually. Through how these portrayals of Greenland were presented in Denmark, Greenland was, somewhat contradictorily, simultaneously shown to be part of the Danish Empire through imagery featuring among other things, the Dannebrog (Danish flag) and national romantic motifs, and exotified through its icy, mountainous landscape, drastically different from that of the flat Denmark, and often misleadingly represented as free of human life, both colonist and Greenlander.

"Danish Dialects" explores notable examples of dialect variation in the Danish-speaking world, both within Denmark and abroad, and features they share with nearby languages. By examining contemporary written and spoken examples of non-standard Danish in the Nordic region, and archival recordings and transcriptions of Danish in the Americas, this project demonstrates the effects of language contact and multilingualism on Danish spoken today or in recent decades.

The project begins with an overview of major Danish dialect groups, lays out specific examples of syntactic, phonetic, and lexical features that distinguish particular varieties from “rigsdansk” (Standard Danish), then situates them geographically to observe how they relate to neighbouring languages including German, Norwegian, Swedish, English, and Spanish.

This project was developed as a lecture for DANI 210, intending to expand on students’ knowledge of rigsdansk and bring awareness to the diverse and often stigmatized local varieties of Danish.

This paper explores the narratives embedded in public discourse and perception of the revitalisation process of the Sámi languages. The Sámi languages are the endangered languages of the people of Sápmi, present across Norway, Finland, Sweden and the Russian Kola peninsula. Beyond the details of these extensive policies and their varied national approaches, looking at the expression around Sámi languages allows a clear look at the major insights that occupy the discourse of Sámi people today.

Through a qualitative data collection scoping through social media platforms and analysing its recurring patterns and key conflicts, four major themes emerge as central to this discussion. They include the lack of fluency in language acquisition expressed by native Sámi, the persistent identification despite these challenges, the opportunity for a global mobility narrative and growing community of practice, and finally the reaction to majoritarian counternarratives.

Looking deeper into these themes reasserts the need for a reframing of Sámi issues as an object inscribed in a national and global context, deserving of national preoccupation.

Last year, I created an art gallery event to raise awareness of Indigenous injustices, spending over 40 hours designing art related to MMIWG, residential schools, Inuit inequalities, and cultural resilience. I connected with my Inuvialuit culture by displaying traditional clothing and artifacts. By networking with elders, I enhanced my knowledge of Inuit history. I practiced advocacy, utilized project management to organize the event, and encouraged visual storytelling and cultural awareness.

I aim to give the same gallery walk presentation virtually (via Zoom) to share my artwork and research on Northern Indigenous injustices.

This presentation aligns closely with CENS 203 - Arctic Art and Activism.

This research sets out to examine the mechanisms through which traditional energy shapes Russia’s national identity and to explore how renewable energy is being discursively and institutionally mobilized under global green transition.

Using a qualitative approach grounded in interpretivism and a two-level theoretical framework, the study analyzes official documents and academic literature to reveal the mechanisms behind identity formation. The findings show that traditional energy acts as a totalizing foundation for identity, serving as a material power base, an institutional backbone for governance, and a symbolic language of sovereignty. Conversely, renewable energy currently plays a peripheral role driven by external pressures and path-dependency.

The research highlights a hybrid identity where Russia pragmatically adopts green rhetoric while maintaining its status as a hydrocarbon superpower. Ultimately, the study suggests that for a successful transition, Russia must leverage fossil fuel wealth to fund green infrastructure and reposition renewable technology as a new tool of statecraft.

I wrote this paper for NORD 341 Arctic Art and Activism with Dr. Tim Frandy last year. It is a comparative essay that discusses two artists; one Russian Siberian band named Otyken, and another more local Canadian artist, Lisa Jackson. The thesis highlights the idea of Indigenous futurism as a movement and how it has been utilized by artists to combat European colonialist ideas.

The essay touches on various ideas:

• Cities and technology as Indigenous
• Western understandings of "sustainability" and "circularity" in the context of traditional Indigenous practices; Post-collapse futures as Indigenous in contrast to conventional solarpunk aesthetics
• "revolution of the imaginary" and the importance of Indigenous artist representation in the growing landscape of technology and popular culture
• The importance of stories for effective political and collective action

This presentation explores identity formation in Moscow through the lens of cultural psychology, focusing in particular on cultural frame switching and the ways individuals come to understand themselves across different social contexts.

Drawing from lived experience alongside cross-cultural research, I consider how everyday environments cue distinct cultural orientations that shape language use, emotional expression, aesthetic choices and patterns of interaction. Rather than approaching identity as something fixed or internally stable, cultural psychology suggests that people move between multiple cultural schemas that become salient in response to situational cues.

While this process is not unique to any one place, Moscow provides a meaningful setting in which historical legacies and contemporary global influences intersect in visible ways. By reflecting analytically on these dynamics, this talk connects personal observation to broader conversations in Central and Eastern European Studies about memory, modernity and the ways social environments shape the formation and expression of identity.

This presentation examines how three visual works foreground civilian vulnerability during wartime through specific compositional strategies.

Focusing on one photograph from Ron Haviv’s documentation of the Bosnian War, Kristina Otchich-Cherniak’s Not Indifferent, and Aris Messinis’s photograph of a children’s hospital converted into a basement shelter in Ukraine, the project considers how framing, spatial arrangement and bodily positioning guide the viewer’s attention. In each case, the arrangement of figures limits depth, restricts movement or isolates bodies within stark visual fields, intensifying the visibility of exposure.

By comparing these formal strategies across Bosnia and Ukraine, the presentation argues that compositional choices shape how civilian suffering is seen, remembered and interpreted within Central, Eastern and Northern European contexts.

In my essay I will explore the contrasting nature of the relationships that the French New Wave and the Scandinavian Dogme 95 cinema movements have with the idea of auteurship. I will focus on how this relationship is affected by the respective movement's views of Hollywood.

Dogme 95 was disgusted with the superficiality and emotional exploitativeness of Hollywood in the nineties, and in reaction created "The Vow of Chastity," a set of radically restrictive film-making rules that aimed to revive the authenticity of cinema. One of these rules was that the director must not be credited.

French New Wave, in contrast, was enamoured with Hollywood in the sixties, and chose to interpret the films as artistic visions and select Hollywood directors as true auteurs. A key element in French New Wave theory was the idea of the "auteur" as being an "author" of a film with a clearly defined artistic voice that was expressed in the film.

This presentation examines the long and complex struggle to unite Germany from the early nineteenth century to the end of World War II.

I begin with the fragmentation of the German states after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of nationalism in the 1800s. I discuss the failed 1848 revolutions and the eventual unification under Otto von Bismarck in 1871. The project then explores how internal tensions, militarism, and nationalism shaped the German Empire, contributed to World War I, and influenced the instability of the Weimar Republic. Finally, I analyze how these developments created conditions that led to dictatorship and the devastation of World War II.

This topic connects to Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies by showing how German unification and expansion reshaped borders, identities, and power structures across the region.

This project examines how anti-LGBTQ+ narratives constructed by the German far-right legitimises the use of violence towards the queer community. The assumed dangers of “gender-ideology” and sexual pluralism has become a core argument of the far-right movement across Europe and world wide, and the impacts are felt both in parliament and on the streets.

Examining policies by the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and ideology weaponized by Neo-Nazi fringe groups such as the “Letzte Verteidungswelle,” this essay will argue that violence towards LGBTQ+ individuals and events is legitimized through the (reconstruction) of a homogenous, “true” Nation. In doing so, it will also trace back alt-right ideology to their historical, fascist origin and evaluate the danger these movements pose towards the queer community and democracy as a whole.

This presentation would combine two research projects I have completed, investigating the role of modernisation in amplifying antisemitism in the German Empire with a focus on the period of 1880-1900.

I found that the desire to modernise among the Jewish societies at this time did not lead to increased respect and acknowledgement from the rest of society, as they had hoped for, but instead manifested and intensified antisemitism. Combined with jealousy, as well as religiously motivated prejudice, antisemitism became not just a widespread opinion, but a solidified ideology with increasingly racist aspects. Political parties instrumentalised the rising antisemitism across society to strengthen politically motivated hatred against Jews to garner support for their agenda.

While there have been many studies on antisemitism during WWII, many scholars disregard the importance of the Imperial period in laying the groundwork for antisemitism as a racial ideology. This project therefore deepens the understanding of the development of these harmful ideas.

My research explores the cultural diffusion of the Grimm’s fairy tales to Japanese popular culture, with a specific focus on the way these fairy tales have been incorporated and reimagined by Japanese Vocaloid artists to create a uniquely Japanese interpretation.

My work highlights the intersection between German and Japanese culture through the medium of popular music. The Grimm’s fairy tales originated as a series of folklore—a malleable and adaptive form of storytelling that continues to take on new meaning. A close reading of contemporary retellings of these fairy tales highlight the ways German media continues to inspire other cultures, and reveals the way these fairy tales continue to resonate with people today.