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Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
Public discourse in Denmark remains committed to the narrative of colonial benevolence, in which Danish presence in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is remembered primarily through care, development, and economic generosity. The story of orsugiak – renamed ‘cryolite’ by Danish geologists – unsettles this narrative. Regarded as Greenland’s ‘white gold’, cryolite became essential to global aluminium production and was mined intensively by Danish companies between 1854 and 1990. While this extraction generated substantial colonial wealth that funded infrastructural and institutional developments in Denmark, the local Inuit community in Kalaallit Nunaat bore the social and environmental costs. In 2025, the documentary film Orsugiak – The White Gold of Greenland brought this history into public view, challenging established accounts of Danish colonialism. The backlash and subsequent deplatforming of the film reveal how colonial hierarchies continue to shape whose knowledge and narratives are granted legitimacy. As a Danish-Kalaaleq researcher and the main narrator of the film, I conceptualise this as `epistemic dispossession’ and argue for Inuit narrative sovereignty as a way of knowing and storying on Indigenous terms. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
30 September 2026
Elizabeth Edwards, Hilary Graham, Andrew Hadfield, Pablo Mukherjee, Mike Savage
The Editors introduce the third issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
30 September 2026
Marcy Norton, in conversation with Josh Milburn
In this interview, Josh Milburn speaks to Marcy Norton about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492. The book explores the contrasting human–animal ‘modes of interaction’ developed in Europe and Native America, and how these modes of interaction impacted, and were impacted by, the 1492 arrival of Europeans in America. The conversation starts with the differences between European hunting and Native American predation, before turning—via a discussion of witchcraft and demonology—to European livestock farming and Native American familiarisation, the latter of which is an important, overlooked part of the origins of contemporary practices of ‘pet-keeping’. The conversation closes with reflections on the methods of animal history, the relationship of animal history to the broader animal studies world, and our own relationships with animals.
30 September 2026
Elizabeth Edwards, Hilary Graham, Andrew Hadfield, Pablo Mukherjee, Mike Savage
The Editors introduce the third issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
30 September 2026
Marcy Norton, in conversation with Josh Milburn
In this interview, Josh Milburn speaks to Marcy Norton about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492. The book explores the contrasting human–animal ‘modes of interaction’ developed in Europe and Native America, and how these modes of interaction impacted, and were impacted by, the 1492 arrival of Europeans in America. The conversation starts with the differences between European hunting and Native American predation, before turning—via a discussion of witchcraft and demonology—to European livestock farming and Native American familiarisation, the latter of which is an important, overlooked part of the origins of contemporary practices of ‘pet-keeping’. The conversation closes with reflections on the methods of animal history, the relationship of animal history to the broader animal studies world, and our own relationships with animals.
30 September 2026
Davina Cooper, Lydia Morris, Shirin M. Rai, Mike Savage, Sylvia Walby
In these grim times, the potential for societies to advance social justice, address unequal access to rights, undo harms, and responsibly grow more sustainable ecologies, seems both challenging to find and ever more necessary. With dystopic developments coming increasingly to the fore, this collection of papers explores the concept of society’s potential to be otherwise and the methodological and evidentiary questions this raises. Such questions include: what is this otherwise and where is it found? How can we know? Is there evidence for any of these possibilities and what kind of evidence do we want or need? How are time and temporality addressed in thinking about futures? Is society’s potential part of its deep ontology, is it made, collectively and with effort, is it something imagined—that we can or should treat as if it existed—and what can we learn from dystopias both on the horizon and those present? These contributions address these themes through reflecting on the role of rights and civic stratification; utopias and the prefigurative; and through concepts of the moral economy.
29 September 2026
Gérard Duhaime, Birger Poppel, MarieKathrine Poppel, Louis-Jacques Dorais
Beginning during the Second World War, the United States concluded a series of agreements with the Kingdom of Denmark that allowed the US considerable latitude to access Greenlandic territory for its own security. The claim of the current US Administration, that it requires control over Greenland for security reasons, is therefore specious. The US interest in annexing the country is more likely motivated by its substantial mineral reserves, especially of rare earth elements, in the face of competition not from China, as alleged, but from the European Union. Under the pretext that rare earths are needed for technologies to tackle the climate crisis, the drive for their extraction is part of a process of militarisation and digitisation set to concentrate shareholder value in unprecedented private fortunes. The annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) would amount to policide, reducing an Indigenous nation to an ethnic minority within the American melting pot. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
29 September 2026