Tourists and researcher identities: critical considerations of collisions, collaborations and confluences in Svalbard

ABSTRACT

Svalbard is an “edge-of-the-world” hot spot for environmental change, political discourse, tourism and scientific research in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, I use this context to critically explore the identity-categories of “researcher” and “tourist”. Through the lens of political ecology, I draw out the uneven power relations of knowledge production that are attached to these labels and their consequences for ongoing efforts for managing sustainable tourism. By considering the experiences of tourists, researchers and “scientific tourists”, both practically and from an embodied experiential perspective, I challenge the distinctions typically made between these roles. I bring to light several common aspects, goals and experiences these practices share. In doing so, I aim to disrupt the existing hierarchies of knowledge that champion an impersonal, rational scientific approach and call for a more varied array of knowledge and practices to be taken into account when considering the future ecologies of Svalbard and the broader Arctic region.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• knowledge production
• political ecology
• Anthropocene
• Svalbard

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback in improving this work. I am grateful to Gareth Hoskins, Kimberley Peters, Stephen Saville and colleagues at Aberystwyth University for comments on earlier drafts. I am also indebted to Dag Avango (KTH) and the students and staff who shared their field trip with me, and to research participants in Aberystwyth and Longyearbyen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Longyearbyen society remains distinct from that of mainland Norway: it is not envisaged as a “life-span community”: there is no social support; births and retirement there are not encouraged.

2. The optional summer course is taught annually at different Arctic locations, see https://www.kth.se/social/course/AK1214/.

3. A zone including the main settlements and mining operations as well as two national parks in the Isfjorden area, central Spitsbergen and the area surrounding Ny-Ålesund in North-West Spitsbergen.

4. However, given data provided by tourist cruises has contributed to increased access restrictions for tourist operators in the past (Bets, Lamers, & Tatenhove, 2017), including other “communities of practice” in these kinds of decisions through, for example, species monitoring, would need to be carefully negotiated and a two-way level of trust developed.

5. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan, Merleau Ponty, David Seamon, Edward Relph, Martin Heidegger.

6. I follow recent discussions in treating affect as before emotion, “a quality of life that is beyond cognition and always interpersonal. It is, moreover, inexpressible: unable to be brought into representation…within and between bodies” (Pile, 2010, p. 8).

7. A TV documentary series which followed a polar bear and her two cubs, filmed in Svalbard. Wilkinson (2013), ‘The Polar Bear Family & Me’. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01py74c#programme-broadcasts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council; Department of Geography and Earth Science, Aberystwyth University.

Notes on contributors

Samantha M Saville

Samantha Saville is currently a research assistant for Aberystwyth University working on the GLOBAL-RURAL project. Her doctoral thesis in Human Geography investigated the environmental politics and value contestations of conservation practices in Svalbard. She has previously worked as a visiting lecturer at Chester University and a tutor and researcher at the Centre for Alternative Technology.