Svalbard Imaginaries

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. 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 PhD. 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.