| Summary: | Abstract This dissertation explores Arctic change: how climate change, entangled with social, political and economic processes on various scales, encompassing discursive and material dimensions, is experienced and responded to in a particular locale. Longyearbyen, Svalbard, which is the focus of the study, is a former coal-mining company town at the tail end of socio-economic restructuring, profoundly globalized and considered a climate-change hotspot. The thesis contributes to the anthropology of (Arctic) climate change by focusing on a hitherto understudied societal context: a non-indigenous, transient, hyper-connected international settler community, lying at the center of Norway’s strategic interests in the north. The study is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, including collaborations in an interdisciplinary research project and cooperations with other social scientists. The thesis consists of six peer-reviewed publications that each address distinct aspects of intertwined socio-natural change in Longyearbyen. I demonstrate how climate change is deeply entangled with other transformations, such as globalization and demographic shifts, the out-phasing of coal mining and the growth in tourism and research/education, and Norwegian high-north politics. These multiple and entwined processes on various scales result in specific challenges and frictions locally in which it becomes impossible to separate concerns with “natural” processes from “social” change, the “local” converges with the “global”, and in which climate change impacts simultaneously as a physical process and as a discourse. To come to terms with this complex hybridity, the thesis engages with current theoretical discussions in anthropology and related disciplines on ontology, climate change and the Anthropocene, which call into question the distinction between nature and culture, material and discursive dimensions of climate change, as well as notions of locally bounded fields. Drawing on these debates and reflecting on my findings, I ...
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