Being a largely qualitative researcher, it's not that often you'll see that many figures in my work. Sometimes putting a number on things is interesting and can give a good overall picture though, so here are a few random things that you might be interested in, quantified from the recent Svalbard fieldwork trip I'm just back from...
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As a parting gesture and small payback for all the help people in Svalbard have given me with my research, I thought it might be fun/interesting/fair to subject myself to the same questions I have been asking. As with all the interviews I have undertaken, I start with the general questions I ask everyone. I usually then move on to some more specific, context dependant ones - so, I'll do a couple of answers to common questions, then leave it open for you to ask whatever you want! Enjoy... Svalbard life can seem a little bit bubble like at times, remote and a little world with quirks all of its own, but the bubble has a permeable surface for sure. There is a lot of talk about Svalbard being a future and indeed present hub of the Arctic, usually from a logistics point of view, but not exclusively. Over the last weeks I have witnessed some of this in a variety of ways. Near the beginning of the trip I remember someone finding the idea of a social science department at UNIS a bit silly as there aren't many people up here, what is there to study that you can't study elsewhere? I haven't said much about the landscape round town for some time. To be honest, for a while I got busy and less attentive after the excitement of the ever changing ice-snow situation in the melt a month or so ago. Also, I have felt more and more weird walking round with a camera given the increased number of tourists around, and my emerging identity as some sort of 'non-tourist'. Well, the wheel keeps turning and though it was a bit grey for a while, summer and plants have to act fast around here. Now, there are flowers everywhere. And grass, not just the straggly yellow stuff that was around before, actual green grass :) oh, and some moss. Seems I won't get complete 'landscape shock' when I get home afterall. So I went out especially for you this cloudy evening and tried to look as casual and local as possible with my camera (probably a fail on that count!)...
One of the things we tend to think about when the word 'value' comes up is economic value, how much can we get for our money. In Svalbard the answer is usually a lot less than you might hope for and after a while you have to stop being shocked and grumbling because it gets a bit boring. My mum used to have a saying, 'sometimes you just have to pay up and look rich', ha, never has it been more applicable! So, just how much are we talking here? Well, I've saved up about a months worth of supermarket receipts, so let's see... I've been following the dicussions in the local paper on the changes to the built environment in Barentsburg over the last few months. Having seen the stark contrasts between old and new last year, I could see where these debates were coming from and where the concerns and different view points on cultural heritage value, decent living conditions, and symbolic image projection met, physically on the streets of the town. I wasn't quite prepared for the level of change I saw between last year and this though. ... |
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