By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, this book illustrates the immense complexities of Svalbard as a place, point of reference, or social concept. It portrays the multiple, situated perspectives that characterize understandings and imaginings of Svalbard, and brings together contributions from academic fields that rarely interact with each other.
Svalbard Imaginaries contributes to a number of research contexts, ranging from a broadly conceived, multi-disciplinary field of ‘Arctic Studies’ to more disciplinary specific debates on how places are reworked at the interstices of various global flows and vice versa. It assembles contributions on imaginaries that cover a wide array of issues, including—but not limited to—Svalbard as a geopolitical site, a landscape, an image, a (mining) heritage assemblage, a tourist destination, a wilderness, a built environment, a site of knowledge production, a site of artistic engagement, and projections of the future. It deliberately assembles analyses that refer to a variety of timescales and covers representations of the past, the present, and possible futures of Svalbard.
Table of Content
Chapter 1. Imaginaries of and in Svalbard: the ‘Making’ of an Archipelago(Mathias Albert).- Part I: Svalbard in the Arctic: Territory and Sovereignty.- Chapter 2. Between Gateway and Theatre: Geopolitics, History and the Framing of Svalbard
(Roald Berg and Klaus Dodds).- Chapter 3. Svalbard as a Norwegian Place and an International Legal Space
(Christoph Humrich).- Part II: Imaginaries through Images.- Chapter 4. Visuals and Voices through Time: Imagining Svalbard with Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1962–1972)
(Eva la Cour and Samantha M. Saville).-Chapter 5. The Arctic Imaginary as Reflected in the UK Television Series Fortitude (Dina Brode-Roger).- Chapter 6. Arctic Views – Virtual Remote Experiences: Reflections from the Field
(Tyrone Martinsson).- Chapter 7. Arctic Imaginaries and Their Entangled Relationship(s) with Artistic Production on Svalbard
(Dina Brode-Roger and Eva la Cour).- Part III: Heritage and Environments.- Chapter 8.Svalbard’s Urban Imaginaries
(Peter Hemmersam).- Chapter 9. Imaginaries of Company Towns on Svalbard
(Ulrich Schildberg).- Part IV: Living Imaginaries.- Chapter 10. A Collective Imagination on the Future of Svalbard Communities
(Lisbeth Iversen).-Chapter 11. Imaginaries of Svalbard, Interdisciplinary Research and Fieldwork: Where Emergent Knowledge Surges
(Jasmine Zhang).- Chapter 12. Pictures of the Arctic: Visitors’ Visions of Svalbard vis-à-vis their Experience in its Landscape
(Martin Fiala).- Chapter 13 Conclusion: Imaginaries of and in Svalbard: What Is Being Made?
(Dina Brode-Roger).
About the author
Mathias Albert is Professor of Political Science at Bielefeld University, with a track record in the history and sociology of world politics, youth research, and, more recently, Arctic studies.Dina Brode-Roger is a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven, where she obtained her Ph D. Her current projects, all on Svalbard, include exploring an embodied understanding of place, the use of visual methods of inquiry, and work on disaster risk reduction.
Lisbeth Iversen has been working in an adjunct position at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen during 2013-2023 on Community Based Monitoring and Citizen Science in the Arctic. Her main research topics are participatory planning, co-creation, placemaking and place leadership.
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