(Un)inhabiting Svalbard: Stories of makings from a transient place in the High Arctic

Abstract

The Svalbard archipelago, as well as the Arctic in general, have long been portrayed as pristine nature, harsh and hostile environment, an uninhabitable space for human beings. In reality the Arctic is home to four million people whose everyday lives have been fast-changing and have been impacted by not only the physical changes but also other broader discourses such as geopolitics, scientific research, sustainability and not to forget global crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic. All these myths, representations, and entangled histories and realities lead to the following questions: How have some places, not others, come to be inhabited? What makes a place inhabitable, and for whom? Who has the right to define that? And how do we view different approaches of inhabiting on different scales? Drawing on both conceptual and empirical materials, this article is a joint effort of us as a group of social scientists who are conducting or have conducted research on Svalbard.1 By telling stories from our respective experiences and backgrounds, we wish to illustrate a more nuanced picture of how economic, geopolitical, scientific, sociocultural, and environmental concerns are always interconnected, and more importantly, how different forms of (in)voluntary inhabiting and uninhabiting in Svalbard, in particular in Longyearbyen and Svea, an possibly lead to or have led to various makings and becomings.