The Roth Foundation offers supplementary funds to a grantee of the American Scandinavian Foundation traveling to Denmark. This prize was instituted in honor of Lois Roth’s friend, Sonja Bungard-Nielsen, long-time director of the Danish American Foundation. This year, Samantha Ruth Brown was selected as a recipient for the Award.

Samantha Brown is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Oregon. She will use the award to support her dissertation research project on “Fermented Foods, Fresh Perspectives: Prioritizing Inuit Food Sovereignty in a Changing Arctic”. Samantha’s project will explore how Greenlandic Inuit perceive the potential export of iginneq, fermented seal blubber, and other traditional foods in fine dining restaurants. She aims to unravel how the use (or rejection of the use) of iginneq resists, disrupts, or replicates colonial logics. She will collaborate with Greenlandic Inuit scholars and communities to generate an interactive story map of traditional Inuit fermentation practices and write a series of academic and popular media articles focused on traditional Inuit foodways in her exploration of what has made Inuit communities more food insecure than other Indigenous Peoples.

For a complete list of recipients of the Project Support Award for work in Denmark, please consult Danish Project Support Alumni.