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Arctic Environmental Modernities offers a diverse and groundbreaking account of the intersections between modernities and environments in the circumpolar global North, foregrounding the Arctic as a critical space of modernity, where the past, present, and future of the planet's environmental and political systems are projected and imagined. Investigating the Arctic region as a privileged site of modernity, Arctic Environmental Modernities articulates the globally significant, but often overlooked, junctures between environmentalism and sustainability, indigenous epistemologies and scientific rhetoric, and decolonization strategies and governmentality. With international expertise made easily accessible, readers can observe and understand the rise and conflicted status of Arctic modernities, from the nineteenth century polar explorer era to the present day of anthropogenic climate change.
Introduction: Arctic Environmental Modernities from the Age of Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene by Lill-Ann Korber, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport
1. The Disappearing Arctic?: Scientific Narrative, Environmental Crisis, and the Ghosts of Colonial History by Andrew Stuhl
2. Petro-Images of the Arctic and Statoil's Visual Imaginary by Synnove Marie Vik
3. Urbanity Without Cities: Arctic Modernization in Northern Scandinavia by Torill Nyseth
4. Cod Society: The Technopolitics of Modern Greenland and the Creation of an Arctic Welfare State by Kristian Hvitfeldt Nielsen
5. Space and Literary History in Arctic Norway: Knut Hamsun in Lule Sami Nordlandda by Kikki Jernsletten and Troy Storfjell
6. The Polar Hero's Progress: Fridtjof Nansen, Spirituality, and Environmental History by Mark Safstrom
7. Heritage, Conservation, and the Geopolitics of Svalbard by Dag Avango and Peder Roberts
8. Toxic Blubber and Seal Skin Bikinis, Or: How Green is Greenland? Ecology in Contemporary Film and Art by Lill-Ann Korber
9. The Negative Space in the National Imagination: Russia and the Arctic by Lilya Kaganovsky
10. Invisible Landscapes: Extreme Oil and the Arctic in Experimental Film and Activist Art Practices by Lisa E. Bloom
11. Icelandic Futures: Arctic Dreams and Geographies of Crisis by Anne-Sofie Nielsen Gremaud
12. Feminist and Environmentalist Public Governance in the Arctic by Eva-Maria Svensson
13.The Greenlandic Reconciliation Commission: Ethnonationalism, Arctic Resources, and Post-Colonial Identity by Kirsten Thisted
14. Arctic Futures and Global Assessment Policy by Nina Wormbs and Sverker Sorlin
Lill-Ann Körber is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Associate Professor II of Modern Scandinavian Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her publications include the co-edited The Postcolonial North Atlantic: Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands (2014).
Scott MacKenzie teaches in the Department of Film and Media, Queen's University, Canada. His many books include Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (co-ed., 2015) and Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (ed. 2014).
Anna Westerståhl Stenport is Professor and Chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. She co-edited Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (2015) and has published extensively on Arctic, Nordic, and European culture, cinema, and literature.
"The essays challenge a conventional view of the Arctic that often relies on 'colonial, gendered, capitalist, and racialized power structures [...] ,' as well as one driven by geopolitics and 'the deductive model of the natural sciences.' Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; faculty and professionals."
– R. A. Delgado Jr., Choice 55(1), September 2017
"Representing a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, the essays in Arctic Environmental Modernities come together to make a powerful argument for re-thinking common assumptions about the far north. This collection demonstrates how modern Arctic environments have been constructed in multiple ways through overlapping and often contested cultural, political and economic agendas. The book offers valuable new perspectives to anyone interested in the contemporary Arctic, and makes a significant contribution to the field of Arctic studies."
– Adrian Howkins, author of The Polar Regions: An Environmental History
"The editors are to be congratulated for putting together a splendid collection of essays tackling Arctic environmental modernities and doing so at a time when global interest in the Arctic is unprecedented. Now, increasingly, indigenous and northern communities in particular have to deal with the messy consequences of humankind becoming a geological agent in its own right. The Arctic is in crisis but this book also offers us some hopeful pointers for its future."
– Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway University of London, UK and co-author of The Scramble for the Poles (2016)
