Knowing Misha the Polar Bear: Multi-naturalism, biography, and conservation in Svalbard. ...

• Main Author: Anderson-Elliott, Henry
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 2022
• Subjects: polar bears; conservation; animal biography; multi-naturalism; zoos; Svalbard; Film; polar bear
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.78489; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/331045

This thesis is about the human engagements with wildlife in the Anthropocene. Specifically, following the work of Lorimer on encountering and conceptualising wildlife in this putative epoch, it explores the idea of ‘knowing polar bears’ in Svalbard. By this I refer to how, through a succession of different interactions within a dynamic actor-network, human actants come to understand Svalbard polar bears. I acknowledge that these encounters are not valueless, instead they are culturally, socially, and politically situated in significant disciplinary, epistemological, and technological histories and imaginaries. It is through and between these multi-species entanglements that different ‘becomings’ and ‘worldings’ are produced. Put simply, there are multiple different conceptions of what polar bears are here, produced in relation to the multiple different ‘ways of knowing’. Primarily, I wanted to ground this approach within work on wildlife conservation, to ask how polar bear conservation as a discipline both ...