ABSTRACT
This chapter explores discourses of work in a small town in Arctic Finland, which is undergoing a “Cold Rush”: a moment of intense political and economic speculation and development. Aspirations for expanding nature-based economies (e.g. tourism) and reopening closed mines are conflicting and hotly debated. These contradictions, and especially the ways in which people manage them, provide a lens for examining how language is mobilized to legitimize particular interests in struggles over the land’s resources. Discourses of work are particularly central to aspirations for economic revitalization in an area understood as a periphery under the nation state logic. This chapter outlines how paying attention to temporality in these discourses, reveals affective attachments to particular forms of desirable work that are rooted in historically specific political and economic conditions. Specifically, this chapter examines how five retired mine workers experience and narrate the past time of mining in addition to its afterlives and imagined futures. By analyzing these narratives, this chapter illustrates how different constructions of time are implicated in discursive power relations; that is, how differently positioned social actors’ struggles to define and impose certain temporal regimes are integral to local development debates and discourses of work.
