Proceedings of the 14th Háskóli Íslands Student Conference on the Medieval North (Reykjavík, April 11th-13th, 2025) Other Things

Abstract

The Háskóli Islands Conference for the Medieval North began in 2011 and has since then endeavoured to amplify the voices of upcoming scholars, primarily studying at a master's or doctoral level. This mission has facilitated the sharing of fresh and exciting scholarship over the past fourteen years, from voices which are new in Old Norse Scholarship, as well as from countries which are often underrepresented in the field. The mission of the conference has therefore always been focused on the peripheries of scholarship, a concept we decided to amplify with this year's theme, Other Things. The topics from this conference covered marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, women, queer people, and the economically oppressed. Not only did it focus on other identities, but the subject of this year's conference invited its participants to consider other things. This could be taken in the broad sense of anything yet also pushed participants to consider the marginal nature of the material world. We, as humans, tend to consider the material world as secondary to the human, meaning the physical world and our environment is pushed aside as irrelevant. This conference has invited its participants to push against this tendency, by centralising the material and natural world.