Svalbard Imaginaries: The Making of an Arctic Archipelago [Hardcover]

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, includingbut not limited toSvalbard 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.

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 p? 78N (19621972) (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 Experilc,