On February 19, 2024 three of our members, Mathias Albert, Dina Brode-Roger, and Lisbeth Iversen, discussed their recently released collection ‘Svalbard Imaginaries: the Making of an Arctic Archipelago’ at Café Huskies in Longyearbyen with Martin Fiala, one of the contributing authors. Following the presentation of the collection, there was an animated discussion with the audience about what an imaginary is and how that plays out here in Svalbard.

The collection, published as part of Palgrave’s ‘Arctic Encounters’ series, was produced by SSSI’s Imaginaries Group in collaboration with several other academic and non-academic authors. Part of the project was to gather all contributing authors for a multi-day workshop at the University of Bielefeld, Germany to share and discuss the chapters. The collection has a diverse range of understandings and engagements with imaginaries and Svalbard. 

The full list of authors, in order of appearance in book, includes contributions by: Mathias Albert, Roald Berg, Klaus Dodds, Christoph Humrich, Eva la Cour, Sam Saville, Dina Brode-Roger, Tyrone Martinsson, Peter Hemmersam, Ulrich Schildberg, Lisbeth Iversen, Jasmine Zhang, Martin Fiala.