Bücher der Reihe Arctic Encounters

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 töSvalbard 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.

This open access book sheds light on 21st-Century multilingualism in the Far North of Europe ¿ Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Estonia ¿ an area with multifaceted contacts between many Uralic and Indo-European languages. These contacts are taking new forms as migration and English as the lingua franca are changing the linguistic situation remarkably. The national languages dominate the life of most inhabitants, while the use of indigenous Saami languages, old minority languages, and the languages of new immigrants is limited to certain areas or domains. This volume takes a close look at multilingual individuals and discusses how their lives are affected by different languages.