ABSTRACT
There are steadily proliferating popular, academic and official narratives of anthropogenic global warming. In these narratives, the Circumpolar Arctic – marked by the imagery of ‘diminishing ice’, ‘opening sea routes’ and ‘dwindling’ number of polar bears – has come to geopolitically embody a somewhat abstract category predominantly defined by physical sciences (Hulme 2009).1 The Arctic is also widely presented as the most glaring evidence at the ‘regional’ scale of the greatest ‘global’ challenge humanity has ever faced. Both the physical manifestations of climate change in the Arctic – e.g., the physical retreat of the Arctic ice and various state and non-state responses they evoke – have resulted in significant discursive transformation of the Circumpolar ‘High North’. This transformation can neither be captured nor explained through the methodologicalanalytical tools of a single discipline belonging to either natural or social sciences.
