Anatomy is destiny, declared Sigmund Freud. Yet, in medieval miracle stories the boundaries between health, illness, death, and life are suspended. Sagas and law codes portrayed disabilities or old age negatively, as unwanted weaknesses. But disabilities were also normalized or could even bring a person closer to God. Old age could bring wisdom and respect. In medieval stories, we find trans monks, disabled cheiftains, and open debates about how nature and nurture impacted gender identity. In Old Norse mythology, gods lose body parts, and male gods give birth to monsters. In Nordic medieval law codes, the body appeared as a readable testimony to a crime. The legal body was portrayed as a fragmented collection of limbs, but at the same time as embedded in its social context through concepts such as manhelgi (the sanctity of man).

We are looking for contributions discussing bodies as both natural and artificial. This may include: Heroic bodies and portrayals of normative and ideal bodies, often coded masculine. But also, bodies that have been othered: Jewish bodies, disabled bodies, demonic bodies, old bodies. We welcome proposals from any academic discipline and are looking for contributions that center the body, whether in Old Norse myths, Catholic culture, or Lutheran society.

This year's Stream centers on the culmination of a decade-long scholarly project: the publication of A Performance Guide to the Songs of Jean Sibelius (Oxford University Press, 2026), by Kathleen Roland-Silverstein. As the first comprehensive performance-oriented study in English of Sibelius's vocal repertoire, the volume offers a timely occasion to reconsider the composer's songs not only as historical artifacts but as living touchstones for ongoing conversations in Nordic musical and cultural studies. The Stream especially encourages presentations that are in parallel to the themes of this year’s conference as well as the aforementioned publication: the Fennoman Movement and its relationship to Finnish composition; studies in Nordic phonetics; the response to AI in the field of contemporary Nordic composition; the compositional response to Iceland’s referendum with the question of joining the EU; maintaining a united Nordic voice at new music festivals in the digital age; composers and compositions with significant milestones.

Together these threads ask what Nordic music study means at a moment of technological, political, and generational change. The accompanying Stream concert, featuring the songs of Sibelius, offers conference attendees a live counterpart to these scholarly conversations, grounding the panel discussions in direct encounter with the repertoire under discussion.

Stream Concert

The Stream concert will feature the songs of Jean Sibelius, his contemporaries, and those he influenced in the larger Nordic musical culture going forward to the present day. The stream especially encourages composers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and performers of Nordic Music to submit to this stream. If proposing a lecture-recital or full-recital, please detail the compositions, the performers, and the performers’ biographies.

Much post-WWII scholarship emphasized how the naturalness of identity and belonging – whether the self-evidence of "blood ties", the characteristics of "races", or the depth of links to place or shared memories – revealed, in its dependence on narratives and cultural schemas, their artificial, constructed character (cf. David Schneider, American Kinship, 1968 [2nd ed. 1980]; Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983; Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations, 2003).

Although these arguments were developed as analyses of modernity and depended on print media and colonial administration, similar ideas characterized the study of premodern epochs. In archaeology, culture-historical approaches that treated assemblages as evidence for peoples and explained change through migration or diffusion were succeeded by approaches emphasizing the situated, negotiated, and constructed character of identities and archaeological interpretation and cautioning against mapping material culture onto ethnic or social groups.

Ancient DNA research and archaeogenetics have complicated the deep past by providing evidence for population movements, admixture, and, in some cases, replacement (cf. David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, 2018; Karin Bojs, Min europeiska familj, 2015 [= My European Family, 2017, focused on Scandinavia]). Such findings do not make biological populations equivalent to socially constituted identities, nor do populations of the deep past map onto groups inhabiting the same geographies. They do, however, invite renewed consideration of the relationship between population history, cultural change, and historically constructed forms of identity and belonging.

In this stream, we would like to think together about how identity and belonging are constructed in the Scandinavian context, across the long arc of history. We welcome contributions relating to any historical period. Possible questions include:

• how do language, naming, genealogy, and narrative create, preserve, or challenge ideas of shared origin and belonging?
• what happens when forms of belonging (familial, local, ethnic, linguistic, religious, national, or transnational) overlap or come into conflict?
• how do narratives of identity and belonging reckon with painful, controversial or culpable pasts?
• what are Scandinavia’s investments vis-a-vis ‘European’ (cf. the title of Bojs’ book!) identity and belonging?
• what roles do concepts of indigeneity play in Scandinavian cultural products?
• how are premodern histories, genealogies, texts, artefacts, and other evidence mobilized to construct or contest modern identities and forms of belonging?
• how have ideas of ancestry, descent, kinship, and blood been used to define belonging across historical periods? how are they being reshaped by modern genetic and commercial ancestry research?

This year’s theme for the ISA Ibsen panel at SASS is “Ibsen and the Art/ific/ial,” which is intended to complement the conference’s overarching theme. Proposals might take a variety of approaches and consider a range of themes related to art, artifice, and the artificial in Ibsen’s writings and their afterlives, including but not limited to:

• Tensions between authenticity and artificiality
• The role of deception and cunning
• The relationship between art and nature
• Ibsen’s legacy in the digital realm
• Adaptation and in/fidelity
• The rejection and/or embrace of theatrical artifice, on page or stage

Please note that SASS also welcomes all proposals for papers related to the works and worlds of Henrik Ibsen, regardless of theme or approach.

If you would like your paper to be considered for the ISA panel, please note as much on your proposal, which should be submitted via the SASS conference portal. In the meantime, please address any queries to the Chair, Olivia Noble Gunn (ogunn@uw.edu).

Art and creative practices serve as a means through which individuals and communities make sense of place, identity, and belonging, whether through inherited traditions or newly forged practices. They offer reflection surfaces for us to find new ways to express identities. This stream invites papers and panels exploring how music, visual arts, architecture, literature, social media, and everyday creative practices shape meaning-making and belonging across the Nordic and Nordic diaspora experience, and how artistic and creative expressions reflect histories and places.

We welcome contributions on topics including, but not limited to: art as a site of identity politics, gender, indigenous art and cultural expression, migration, and multilingual or minority experience; music and visual art as vehicles for community formation, memory, and resistance; digital and social media as spaces for artistic self-expression, political identities, activism, and belonging. In addition, we invite submissions about folk traditions in dialogue with contemporary art practice; and diasporic or transnational Nordic art-making that negotiates multiple homes and identities at once. We are especially interested in papers that treat art not merely as object or output, but as lived practice — something people do together to create, contest, or sustain a sense of belonging. We welcome performance-based submissions with visual and embodied components including music. Perspectives from art history, ethnomusicology, literature, cultural studies, media studies, and beyond are all welcome.

The technologies that mediate culture—from the vellum and paper used to make books to the digital infrastructure underpinning streaming services and AI—are dependent on the availability of sufficient energy resources. The growing demand for these resources, from livestock grazing, forestry, hydropower to fossil fuel extraction and windfarms, appear in the physical environment as what we term here “energy landscapes.” The controversy surrounding data centers is just the latest in a long history of landscape transformations in the service of energy needs. From deforested Iceland to dams that block reindeer migration routes in Sápmi, from coal mines on Svalbard to nuclear waste bunkers in Finland, energy landscapes make visible and tangible the cost of our dependencies on energy abundance and growth.

In this stream, we invite contributions that explore the history and culture of energy landscapes in Nordic countries. How are energy landscapes entangled with aesthetic preferences and cultural practices over time? How have new energy landscapes been opposed and accepted, which strategies have activists and energy companies used to influence attitudes towards energy landscapes? How are energy landscapes represented and reflected in today’s literary and screen cultures? Do aesthetic and affective responses to energy landscapes inform opinions towards new technologies?

In a cultural moment in which growing demand for energy collides with geopolitical tensions around supply and increased awareness of the environmental costs of energy systems, this stream provides an opportunity to explore and compare different historical and geographical case studies from across the Nordic region and consider the connections between energy systems, landscapes, and cultural production.

Taking Lessing’s Laocoön treatise (1766) as its point of departure, early nineteenth-century aesthetics deemed visual art static, lifeless, and—one might say—artificial. Poetry, on the other hand, was supposed to be dynamic, vibrant, and—in the Platonic sense—real. By poetry, the aestheticians meant verse performed orally rather than fixed to the page, but Romantic authors cultivated various techniques for exerting their living presence in print, as Friedrich Kittler demonstrates in the German context in his Aufschreibesysteme (1985). Thus, literature towered over the visual arts in conventional aesthetic hierarchies circa 1800.

By the middle of the century, however, technologies such plein-air painting and photography had redeemed the image both aesthetically and epistemologically. Whereas the former eventually led to a livelier style of brushwork that recalled paint or even light in motion, the latter produced images that were commonsensically “more real” than those of other media. Meanwhile, movements such as Naturalism on the Continent and the Modern Breakthrough in the Nordics rejected the alleged artifice of Romanticism for new forms of art, fiction and drama that captured fin-de-siècle society with a gaze as unsparing as that of a camera, rendering an empirical—rather than a Platonic—truth or reality.

This stream welcomes papers on any aspect of visual art in the Nordics in the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), or papers on the notion of artificiality in relation to the literature, film, or music of the period. With that said, the organizers are particularly interested in presentations that engage with the mid-century turn described above, in which the image went from mere inanimate artifice to a particularly modern paradigm of living truth.