Research

Research interests

I am interested in theorising and understanding how political actors describe, depict and imagine the world around them. I am finishing up a PhD project applying this interest to the Arctic region. I am currently thinking of how this could be applied more broadly. How do political actors, including individuals, depict sustainability, for example? What everyday imaginaries shape people's hopes and aspirations for times to come? And which tensions exist, where do visual vocabularies and descriptive statements clash? I am also fascinated by the link between these questions and technological innovation. AI generated imagery leaves an imprint on how we see the world, and pulls online imagery away from the truth-claim analogue imagery has often been seen to represent. Likewise, pop-cultural works shape political imagination and perception. TV viewers' or video gamers' experiences of the world may shape their expectations to dynamics and political struggles in real life. For example, both Westeros (A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones), Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls) and Azeroth (Warcraft/WoW) all have northern regions that seem to hold some sort of apolitical, sometimes supernatural, potential to shape the outside world.

This mirrors my other more empirical research pillar, namely the Arctic. Is it a far-flung, frozen tundra, a bustling business hub - or perhaps a geopolitical hotspot? My interest in the Arctic emerged after spending four years in the UK, where "the Arctic" typically invokes heroic images of Victorian explorers battling the elements. When I went from there to Tromsø, a northern Norwegian city that at the time stressed an "Arctic capital" tagline, differences emerged. In that version of the Arctic, people sat at the beach, watched football and drank Coca-Cola. Just like anywhere else! This eventually led to a research emphasis on how the Arctic is constructed, as well as how that construction affects international politics.

Want the bite-sized version? Check out my podcast episode on Jana Gheuens' How Green is Your Deal?

Published research

DW: The race for the Arctic

Arctic Discourses: Tall tales?

This video by DW starts from a storyline we often encounter when we hear about the Arctic: A relatively untouched and often ignored area is turning into a powder keg on the back of climate change. And yet, experts and policymakers working on the region, even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have stressed that the Arctic is uniquely cooperative. In 2019-2021, I tried to unpack this paradox, by evaluating whether states, organisations, indigenous groups, businesses and NGOs with an Arctic state agree what hallmarks the region. I found that all actors share an emphasis on the Arctic environment, but that this often leads to different interpretations of what should come next. The results of that study were published in Geopolitics in 2021, with a preprint available here.

Tall Tales from the High North.pdf

Picturing the Arctic

Adobe Firefly's visualisation of "A sustainable Arctic" AI generated content

Picturing the Arctic digital imagery and the prospect of using search engines to collect data for interpretative political research-1.pdf

The Arctic is not only shaped by text. As few have personal experience with the region, many rely on online imagery to understand, envisage and imagine what it looks like. The photo above is generated by an AI, based on the prompt "A sustainable Arctic". Is this what sustainability looks like, and if so for whom? Is this a sustainable future for fishing communities or reindeer herders? While AI imaginaries will be all the more important in the coming years, I paid attention to how political actors depict the Arctic in their online imagery. This, it turns out, is not easy with political science's current toolkit, so I propose a tool to study online imagery in its own right. This article is available open access in Political Research Exchange, as well as on this site. I hope to advance thinking on visuals and imaginaries in the future, also with an eye to AI-generated imagery.

Role spillover: The EU in the Arctic

Role Spillover FPA.pdf

The EU has aspired to become an actor in the Arctic for decades, but has struggled with getting a seat at the table, because of resistance to its bid for Arctic Council observer status. This is useful for understanding how external actors attempt to establish a role for themselves in regional settings. I build a concept of role spillover, noting how an actor wanting a role in context X also is bound by its behaviour in context Y. This was the case with the EU's Arctic Council's observership bid, which was resisted not because the EU lacked capacity to act in the Arctic, but because of two tangential cases, namely a ban on seal products and geopolitical tensions with Russia. Read more in the open access article in Foreign Policy Analysis or right here.

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