Where will the IASS conference be held?

The conference will be held in Malmö, SWE.

What is the primary focus of the IASS conference?

The conference focuses on the academic study of Scandinavian cultures, languages, and societies, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue in the Malmö, SWE setting.

IASS 2027: Malmö – 36th International Association for Scandinavian Studies Conference

Name: IASS 2027: Malmö – 36th International Association for Scandinavian Studies Conference
Start: 2027-08-04T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-08-07T00:00:00Z
Location: Malmö

Aug 4–7, 2027Malmö, SwedenIn-person

Registration open

The International Association for Scandinavian Studies (IASS) will convene its conference in Malmö, Sweden. This gathering serves as a critical forum for scholars and researchers dedicated to the multifaceted study of Scandinavian cultures, languages, and societies. The event fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and the dissemination of new research findings within the field.

Committees & topics

Topics
The City and the Country in Nordic Culture · Exodus from and Return to the Countryside in Art and Literature · The Cultural and Literary History of Suburbs · City and Countryside in Climate Fiction · Blue, Green and Urban Humanities in Scandinavian Studies · Industrial Landscapes in Art and Culture · The Aesthetics of Regional Dialects · Centre and Periphery as Cultural Coordinates

Why it matters

The IASS conference is significant for its role in advancing the academic understanding of the Nordic region. By bringing together experts from various disciplines, it facilitates a comprehensive exploration of the historical, contemporary, and future trajectories of countries like SWE, NOR, DNK, FIN, and ISL, as well as autonomous territories such as FRO and GRL. Such focused academic discourse is essential for nuanced policy-making and cultural exchange, offering insights into the unique societal models and challenges prevalent in these nations.

Furthermore, the conference provides a platform for scholarly networking and collaboration, which is vital for the continued growth and evolution of Scandinavian studies as an academic field. The exchange of ideas and methodologies among researchers helps to refine analytical frameworks and encourages innovative approaches to understanding the region's complexities. This intellectual cross-pollination ultimately enriches global academic discourse and contributes to a more informed international perspective on the Nordic countries.

How to prepare

For those engaging with the IASS conference, a robust understanding of the diverse cultural and political landscapes of the Scandinavian countries is paramount. Participants should consider how various national identities and historical narratives intersect and diverge across the region. Preparing for discussions on topics such as 'gender-dynamics-across-cultures' will require a nuanced appreciation of how these themes manifest uniquely in different Nordic contexts.

Delegates should also consider the broader geopolitical implications of Scandinavian studies. Understanding the region's role in international relations, its contributions to global governance, and its unique approaches to social welfare and environmental policy can provide a richer context for academic presentations. Employing 'dynamic-analysis' to assess the evolving relationships between the Nordic states and the wider world will be beneficial for engaging in productive dialogue at the conference.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Sweden

As the host nation, Sweden plays a central role in facilitating academic exchange on Scandinavian studies.

Role in topic

Sweden's rich cultural heritage and its position as a leading nation in social innovation and welfare policy make it a focal point for many discussions within Scandinavian studies. Its academic institutions are key contributors to research in the field.

Norway

Norway contributes significantly to the understanding of Scandinavian identity through its distinct cultural and economic models.

Role in topic

Norway's unique economic structure, particularly its management of natural resources, and its strong emphasis on cultural preservation, offer valuable comparative perspectives within Scandinavian studies.

Denmark

Denmark's historical influence and contemporary societal structures are crucial for a comprehensive view of the Nordic region.

Role in topic

Denmark's historical role as a regional power and its modern contributions to design, urban planning, and social policy are frequently examined within the scope of Scandinavian studies.

Finland

Finland's distinct linguistic and cultural identity provides a unique lens through which to view Scandinavian studies.

Role in topic

Despite its non-Germanic language, Finland is integral to the Nordic identity. Its educational system, technological advancements, and unique cultural expressions are important areas of study.

Iceland

Iceland's isolated yet culturally rich history offers singular insights into Scandinavian heritage and adaptation.

Role in topic

Iceland's sagas, its unique linguistic preservation, and its adaptation to a challenging environment provide a distinct and valuable perspective within the broader field of Scandinavian studies.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

The City and the Country in Nordic Culture

The tension between urban and rural life is one of the most persistent organizing dualities in Scandinavian cultural history. From the agrarian romanticism of the nineteenth-century National Romantic movement — with painters such as Sweden's Anders Zorn, Norway's Adolph Tidemand and Finland's Akseli Gallen-Kallela elevating the peasant and the fjord landscape — to the rapid urbanization that followed industrialization in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki, Nordic writers and artists have repeatedly returned to the city/country axis to negotiate questions of modernity, belonging, and national identity. The Modern Breakthrough of the 1870s-80s, associated with Georg Brandes and writers such as Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and August Strindberg, sharpened the contrast by linking the city to secularism, sexual politics and social critique, and the countryside to tradition, kinship and folk authenticity. The twentieth century complicated this binary. The folkhem ideology in Sweden, the cooperative movement in Denmark, and the strong regionalism of Norwegian nynorsk literature all sought, in different ways, to reconcile rural roots with urban modernity. Postwar welfare-state planning produced new towns, satellite suburbs and depopulated peripheries, while writers from Tarjei Vesaas to Sara Lidman, and more recently Kjell Westö, Vigdis Hjorth and Karl Ove Knausgård, have continued to mine the cultural meanings of place. Today, debates over rural decline, climate-driven land use, and the cultural authority of the capital cities keep the city/country dyad analytically alive.

Key players

Exodus from and Return to the Countryside in Art and Literature

The depopulation of the Nordic countryside is among the defining social experiences of the modern era. Between roughly 1850 and 1930, more than a million Swedes, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians, Danes, Finns and Icelanders emigrated, most to North America, while internal migration drew rural populations into expanding industrial cities. This double exodus generated a vast cultural archive: Vilhelm Moberg's Utvandrarna tetralogy, Knut Hamsun's Markens grøde, Halldór Laxness's Sjálfstætt fólk, and the proletarian rural fiction of Ivar Lo-Johansson and Moa Martinson all interrogated what was lost, gained and mythologized in leaving the land. From the 1970s, a counter-movement — the so-called gröna vågen in Sweden and parallel back-to-the-land currents elsewhere — reframed the countryside as a site of ecological renewal and existential authenticity, a theme that recurs in the films of Roy Andersson, the novels of Kerstin Ekman, and the autofiction of Knausgård. In the 2010s and 2020s, rural depopulation, the closure of village schools, and political polarization between metropolitan and peripheral voters have prompted a new wave of 'return' narratives, including the works of Nina Lykke, Linnea Axelsson's Sámi epic Aednan, and a broader regional turn in Nordic literary publishing.

Key players

The Cultural and Literary History of Suburbs

The Nordic suburb is a product of postwar welfare-state planning. Sweden's Miljonprogrammet (1965-74), Denmark's almene boligområder, Finland's lähiöt and Norway's drabantbyer aimed to deliver modern, sanitary housing to the new urban working class, often at the edges of expanding capitals. From the outset these landscapes were culturally ambivalent: celebrated as monuments to social democratic ambition, criticized as alienating concrete deserts. Early literary engagement appears in the work of P.O. Enquist, Sonja Åkesson and Per Olov Sundman, while the Finnish lähiörunous (suburb poetry) of the 1970s gave the genre a distinctive voice. From the 1990s onward, immigration reshaped many of these areas demographically, and a new generation of writers, filmmakers and rappers — Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Johannes Anyuru, Athena Farrokhzad, Yahya Hassan, the Stockholm rap scene, the Helsinki suburb chronicles of Ranya ElRamly/Paananen — have made the förort, forstad or lähiö a primary site of contemporary Nordic cultural production. The suburbs are now central to debates over segregation, surveillance, racialization, and the limits of the welfare state, while also generating some of the region's most vital aesthetic innovation.

Key players

City and Countryside in Climate Fiction

Scandinavian climate fiction has emerged as one of the most internationally visible strands of contemporary Nordic literature. Maja Lunde's climate quartet (Bienes historie, Blå, Przewalskis hest, Drømmen om et tre), Andri Snær Magnason's Um tímann og vatnið, Jens Liljestrand's Även om allt tar slut, and the eco-thrillers of Antti Tuomainen have brought the climate crisis into mainstream fiction, while a parallel ecocritical scholarship has grown around figures such as Kerstin Ekman, Aase Berg and Sámi writers including Linnea Axelsson and Ann-Helén Laestadius. A recurring structural feature of Nordic cli-fi is its mapping of climate stress onto the city/country axis: flooded coastal capitals, abandoned interiors, climate refugees moving between Mediterranean and Nordic latitudes, and reindeer herding lands disrupted by mining, wind power and warming. The genre thus reactivates older Nordic traditions of pastoral and apocalyptic writing while engaging directly with current controversies over green industrialization in northern Sweden and Finland, Arctic shipping, and Indigenous Sámi land rights.

Key players

Blue, Green and Urban Humanities in Scandinavian Studies

The 'environmental humanities' have reshaped Scandinavian studies over the past two decades, with three increasingly distinct subfields: green humanities (forest, field, wilderness), blue humanities (sea, fjord, river, ice) and urban humanities (city, infrastructure, metropolitan ecology). The Nordic region is a productive laboratory for all three, given its long coastlines, dense forests, rapidly urbanizing capitals and strong tradition of allemannsretten/allemansrätten public access to nature. Research centres such as KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm, the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, and the Aarhus AURA project have placed Nordic scholarship at the forefront of the field internationally. Key debates concern how to integrate Indigenous Sámi knowledge, maritime and fisheries history, Arctic and sub-Arctic ecologies, and the politics of green transition into literary and cultural analysis. Blue humanities scholars have foregrounded the Baltic and the North Atlantic as cultural spaces; urban humanities work examines Copenhagen's cycling infrastructure, Stockholm's archipelago suburbs and Reykjavík's geothermal landscapes as humanistic objects. The committee theme asks how these strands speak to each other.

Key players

Industrial Landscapes in Art and Culture

Nordic industrialization came late but transformed regional landscapes dramatically: the bruk (ironworks) of Bergslagen, the sawmills and pulp industry of the Bothnian coast, the shipyards of Malmö, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Aalborg, the hydroelectric installations of the Norwegian fjords, the mines of Kiruna and Sulitjelma. These spaces generated a distinctive cultural archive — the working-class realism of Folke Fridell and Kurt Salomonson, the documentary photography of Sune Jonsson, the films of Bo Widerberg and Aki Kaurismäki, and the proletarian poetry tradition stretching from Dan Andersson to contemporary writers such as Jenny Wrangborg. As heavy industry has contracted or relocated, the cultural focus has shifted toward post-industrial memory: the conversion of factories into museums and creative quarters, Kiruna's ongoing urban relocation due to mining subsidence, debates over rare-earth and battery projects in northern Sweden and Finland, and the aestheticization of ruins. Industrial landscapes are also a flashpoint in Sámi cultural politics, as new 'green' industries — wind farms, lithium mines, hydrogen plants — reproduce older patterns of extractive land use.

Key players

The Aesthetics of Regional Dialects

The Nordic languages have unusually rich and politically charged dialect landscapes. Norway is the paradigmatic case, with two official written standards — bokmål and nynorsk — and a strong norm of speaking dialect in public life, including in broadcasting and parliament. Sweden, Denmark and Finland (in both Finnish and Finland-Swedish) have more centralized standards but vibrant dialect literatures, from the Scanian writing of Piraten and Jacques Werup to the Ostrobothnian prose of Lars Sund and the Jutlandic poetry tradition. Faroese and Icelandic, and the Sámi languages across Sápmi, raise further questions about minority-language aesthetics and standardization. Contemporary writers increasingly mobilize dialect, sociolect and multiethnolect for aesthetic effect: Khemiri's Stockholm 'Rinkeby Swedish', Yahya Hassan's Aarhus voice, Linnea Axelsson's North Sámi-inflected Aednan, and a wave of nynorsk authors including Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel laureate. The committee theme considers how dialect functions as style, identity, political claim and cultural-heritage object, and how translation and audio media reshape its reach.

Key players

Centre and Periphery as Cultural Coordinates

Centre/periphery has been a foundational analytic in Nordic studies since at least Stein Rokkan's political sociology of the 1960s and 70s, which mapped how peripheries — linguistic, religious, economic, geographic — shaped Nordic state formation. In cultural terms, the model captures the relationship between metropolitan capitals (Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Reykjavík) and their hinterlands, between southern cores and northern Sápmi, between mainland Denmark and the North Atlantic (Faroes, Greenland), and between the Nordic region and the wider European literary system as theorized by Pascale Casanova and others. Contemporary scholarship complicates the binary by attending to multiple centres, transnational networks, and the agency of so-called peripheries: Sámi literature and film now circulate globally; Faroese and Greenlandic writers reach international audiences; provincial Swedish noir defines a major export genre. At the same time, political tensions between metropolitan and rural voters, debates over cultural funding outside the capitals, and the climate and security repositioning of the Arctic give the centre/periphery framework renewed urgency.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for IASS 2027: Malmö – 36th International Association for Scandinavian Studies Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Frederick Douglass Bridge Protest Disrupts DC

AMVCA 2026

Reviving Identity

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

IASS 2027: Malmö – 36th International Association for Scandinavian Studies Conference

Aug 4–7, 2027Malmö, SwedenIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
The City and the Country in Nordic Culture · Exodus from and Return to the Countryside in Art and Literature · The Cultural and Literary History of Suburbs · City and Countryside in Climate Fiction · Blue, Green and Urban Humanities in Scandinavian Studies · Industrial Landscapes in Art and Culture · The Aesthetics of Regional Dialects · Centre and Periphery as Cultural Coordinates

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Sweden

As the host nation, Sweden plays a central role in facilitating academic exchange on Scandinavian studies.

Role in topic

Norway

Norway contributes significantly to the understanding of Scandinavian identity through its distinct cultural and economic models.

Role in topic

Denmark

Denmark's historical influence and contemporary societal structures are crucial for a comprehensive view of the Nordic region.

Role in topic

Denmark's historical role as a regional power and its modern contributions to design, urban planning, and social policy are frequently examined within the scope of Scandinavian studies.

Finland

Finland's distinct linguistic and cultural identity provides a unique lens through which to view Scandinavian studies.

Role in topic

Despite its non-Germanic language, Finland is integral to the Nordic identity. Its educational system, technological advancements, and unique cultural expressions are important areas of study.

Iceland

Iceland's isolated yet culturally rich history offers singular insights into Scandinavian heritage and adaptation.

Role in topic

Iceland's sagas, its unique linguistic preservation, and its adaptation to a challenging environment provide a distinct and valuable perspective within the broader field of Scandinavian studies.