| "Ruins challenge us to make sense of them, as they frame emptiness and dramatize the evanescence of meaning...we need to make them speak and militate for our theories" Schönle, A. (2006 p. 652) Whilst the fascination with ruins in academia and beyond can be questioned for it's potential for nostalgic views on troubled pasts through the attractive aesthetics of urban decay, or 'ruin porn', there are still important stories, experiences and lessons to be learned from such sites (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013).... | 
Coles Bay, Svalbard, February 2015
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Though science might take front and centre stage quite often in Svalbard, art certainly plays some interesting roles up here. There are long-standing artists residency programmes (for both Longyearbyen and Ny Alesund) and expedition trips (like The Arctic Circle or Cape Farewell) specifically for artists and art-science collaborations, which have attracted many to these shores, searching for meaning, inspiration, difference, peace, ways to communicate climate change...other things I'm sure. I've found inspiration and ideas from talking with some of them myself. Now art has been ramped up a step in Longyearbyen... 
On Longyearbreen looking into town.
 Sometimes I wonder why people don't recognise me, this probably explains it! Since I just received a weather warning for Aberystwyth, (looks like it's storms and hide tide time again, brace yourselves those at home!) this post I wrote earlier seems all the more apt. After Monday's wet and mild weather things have been getting steadily colder and we've had a bit of snow fall, it all got much nicer to get about on. Given I was pretty worried about how my sun-loving self would cope in the cold, I thought I'd reflect a bit on the temperature and light conditions...
 View to Templet mountain and Sassenfjorden from Elveneset For once, I'm not talking about environmental regulations, though I very well could be, given the multitude of boundaries lurking on the map, but not visible in the landscape, but that's another story... No, today I stepped over a fear and re-arranged my own values in doing so. To most people it would look like an ordinary tourist trip out on a snow scooter though, and in some ways it was...
 Ice spike boot attachments: a fiver well spent! I never thought I'd say that kind of phrase! After the -23 clear skies of Saturday, the blizzard and white out yesterday. Today, we have a new challenge: standing upright and going in the direction intended. It's warmer here than in Oslo at +3 degrees, and raining. This has turned almost all the roads and flat surfaces into a giant potential ice rink. Again, most tours are off, but for very different reasons. Amazing how much can change so quickly round here! Walking about (and driving too) is really a struggle, I'm quite surprised I managed to stay upright all day (ok there was a moment of bum-shuffling to reach some deliciously crunchy snow and get up an incline avoiding the ice). Hooray for these little gizmo's. So, with the challenge of standing up without camera in hand, there are no landscapes and light pics to woo you with today. Though today was the first offical return of the light and the sky, between showers, was looking brighter.
Today's forecast was good and the clouds lifted, revealing just how light it gets around midday now. So, given it looks to be a pretty stormy day tomorrow I thought I would make the most of the still conditions, don some ski trousers, get toasty and go for a proper round-town trek.    One of the interesting things I came accross was this little hut. Made in August last year by artist Solveig Egeland (with help from volunteers) from waste gathered on the annual svalbard coast clean up. It has caused quite some controversy in town, given it received money from the Environment Protection Fund and the enticement to volunteers to get involved was to win a trip to Venice (!). Originally, it was due to be taken down again, but I'm really glad people stepped up at the last minute to take responsibility for maintaining it. This might be candidate for the best symbolic image of the PhD yet - so many questions of what is valuable, how it should be valued, what should be protected and how, who gets to decide and how to engage people in environmental issues are enmeshed in this amazing hut. Plus it embodies the Flowering Elbow ethos - making cool stuff with would-be waste!   Oslo airport, first thing I saw through departures! Well, when I left last summer, I wrote that I didn't know if I would be coming back to Svalbard, I really didn't. It seems that the conviction and numbers of people that told me to come back in winter/spring, combined with some diligent budgeting (and understanding funders) and my own curiosity has led me back and I find myself here again at 78N, and at the end of a cold snap...
This week I took part in a two day interdisciplinary, multi-modal research workshop, organised by the ESRC Wales DTC in Cardiff. The aim of the day was to explore the different modes we make meaning and observe with, the affordances of four key media with which we can record ethnographic observations, and the relationship between these modes and media. The event was a great mixture of discussion ad practical fieldwork. We started out discussing and fleshing out the distinctions and crossovers between the ideas of modes and media, building on the paper we had read[1] . Then we discussed the four different media we would be concentrating on in the workshop with the four leaders: field notes (Bella Dicks), still images (Rachel Hurdley), audio (Brett Lashua) and video (Bambo Soyinka). After introducing the research question: How is Gorsedd Gardens made into a meaningful place through the social interactions of people, objects, materials, 'nature', sounds time within it? We were then let loose to explore the Gardens...  NOT Gorsedd Gardens but Alexander Gardens nearby where I thought we were doing fieldwork! Time has flown by since I returned from Svalbard, it's been 2 months already! It has been an interesting and slightly chaotic time. I hadn't really thought about what it would be like having 'done' my fieldwork, except that it meant I ought to get on with analysis and writing and could for a while forget about organising funding and travel details. For the first couple of weeks it felt a bit like coming down from a long holiday - trying to get back into some sort of routine, enjoying the comforts and beauty of home, but missing the excitement of exploring a new place.  Sun beams on the sea, sheep, grass and trees on my way to the office :) I wouldn't say I was suffering complete 'post-fieldwork blues', but I can certainly relate to some of the experiences of Michelle Redman's post, especially about loving the 'doing' aspects and instant feedback opportunities fieldwork brings.
 Back to Aberystwyth just in time to see the sunset! 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...
 Research back at ya! 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...
 It's ok 'cos everything comes wrapped in a polar bear 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. ...  Barentsburg - Managed and owned largely by Russian Trust Arcticugol (under Norwegian laws). Houses around 500 people. Most are Ukranian and work in the coal mine there and services for it. Given the changes, I think it's a handy idea having the date on the monument.  Scrap metal lined up for shipping in Pyramiden I have been thinking about ‘waste’ and its value quite a lot while in Svalbard. Pyramiden one might think is an extreme example. However, though teaming with things that are no longer in use for their original purpose, there is a significant amount that is not in fact discarded or unwanted, either being valued as cultural history (for some) and embedded with memories and stories. Or, in the case of metal structures and machinery, being harvested for scrap metal to be sold when shipped out. Which is to say nothing of the relationship or potential conflict between the two…
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