Book: Ruptured Landscapes (2015)

Presents an innovative synthetic understanding of the dynamic relationship between conceptual, material and cognitive phenomena of rupture, brought together in the unifying trope of landscape. H Sooväli-Sepping, H Reinert and J Miles-Watson, eds. 2015. Ruptured Landscapes—Landscape, Identity and Social Change. Springer: Landscape Series.

Chapter: The Landscape Concept as Rupture—Extinction and Perspective in a Norwegian Fjord (2015)

Drawing on a case study of landscape-level protection measures implemented in a fjord in the Norwegian Arctic, this chapter takes the concept of rupture as a productive opening on the complex social, spatial and biopolitical dynamics of more-than-human landscapes. The argument examines a series of disruptions associated with the efforts of ecologists to protect a …

Article: Misreading the Arctic Landscape (2015)

Sámi reindeer pastoralism in Norway is said to be in a state of crisis that has lasted for several decades and is due to excessive numbers of reindeer. A general overstocking of the range is believed to cause widespread pasture degradation, poor economic performance, and increasing land-use conflicts. These are the main assumptions of a …

Article: Conceptualising resilience in Norwegian Sami reindeer pastoralism (2015)

Resilience thinking has growing purchase in the context of Arctic policy, resource management and indigenous politics. The present text outlines and compares two conflicting versions of the resilience concept, both currently at work in the field of contemporary Norwegian Sa ́mi reindeer pastoralism. First, while ecological resilience originally emerged as a challenge to mainstream equilibrium …

Article: Weight, Density and Space in the Norwegian Reindeer Crisis (2014)

For decades now, the dominant narrative about indigenous reindeer pastoralism in northern Norway has been that there is a crisis of excess: an oversized reindeer population, poorly held in check by poorly governed herders, is overgrazing the tundra, degrading the pasture grounds, spilling over into urban spaces and precipitating moral crises by starving to death …

Article: Entanglements—Intimacy and Nonhuman Ethics (2014)

Drawing on ethnographic material from the Norwegian Arctic, this article explores issues of specificity, encounter, and emplacement in human-animal relations through the lens of modernizing indigenous reindeer pastoralism in the region. In turn, the main sections of the argument examine three things: first, the changing technological context of indigenous herding practice, focusing on the impact …

Article: The Care of Migrants–Telemetry and the Fragile Wild (2013)

Drawing on a multi-sited study of transnational efforts to safeguard the highly endangered Lesser White-fronted Goose (Anser Erythropus), the text develops an argument about a certain “biopolitics of the wild”—a particular mode of governing nonhuman life, rooted in certain conditions of visibility and engagement. As a wild avian population, the Lessers are known and managed …

Article: The Disposable Surplus—Notes on Waste, Reindeer and Biopolitics (2012)

The article examines the emergence of waste as an industrial category in the context of contemporary indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralism and slaughter in northern Norway. In recent decades, commercially available substitutes and the industrial reorganization of slaughter have displaced traditional methods of extraction and utilization. As a result, the slaughtered reindeer body has been reorganized …

Article: Knives for the Slaughter—Notes on the reform and governance of indigenous reindeer slaughter in Norway (2012)

Drawing on historical records and ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the history of the so-called curved knife, or krumkniv, as a window on the governance and regulation of indigenous Sámi reindeer slaughter in Norway. Originally developed by scientific activists in the 1920s, in the context of a series of experimental field trials held at a …