Ethical Considerations

All research and scientific activity is based on trust. Through the planning, conducting and reporting of a study, researchers need to use methods that are accepted by the research community, legal by law, ethical and updated according to contemporary academic discourses. I know, respect and relate to issues of research ethics that apply to the discipline through the planning, conducting and reporting of the research.

As regards document and map studies, I have made selection criteria of sources and methodical handling as transparent as possible. Regarding social

research, I have followed the ethical guidelines of NSD, the Norwegian Pri-vacy Ombudsman for Research [personvernombudet]. The contact at NSD, who helped me with the application form and letter of consent, was very helpful in discussing how to handle cartographies and visual data, themes that are not thoroughly described in the guidelines. All research that regards humans shall build on prior informed consent. At its point of departure, a landscape study is not “on” people or communities but related to people and communities.

Ethical conduct of research in Indigenous areas is increasingly becoming an issue in academic discourse. Since 1997, the Sámi Parliament/Sámediggi, the University of Tromsø and the Sámi University for Applied Sciences in Kautokeino/Sámi Allaskuvla have discussed drawing up ethical guide-lines for research in Sámi areas. A greater interest in Indigenous questions, knowledge and ontologies also implies a greater pressure on the Indigenous communities to give accounts of their life and landscapes to researchers. The Norwegian Biodiversity Act (Naturmangfoldsloven) requires consideration of a prospect’s effects on biodiversity and that Indigenous knowledge should be a part of this consideration. In April 2015, I gave a formal presentation of my project at the district board of Fiettar, a large reindeer husbandry district that experiences pressure from researchers who want to work with them. The then leader of the district board said:

– As long as these [ethical guidelines] is not settled, it creates uncer-tainties about research ethics among the reindeer pastoralists. We ex-perience a growing pressure from the research community, a condition that creates some strong opinions. (Leader of Fiettar District Board, 2015)

The Norwegian Privacy Ombudsman for Research further recommends that I represented the series of interviews in the encircling and contextual phase in mappings.

Consideration of ethics and reflexivity not only applies to research design and data collection, it must also be borne in mind in relation to what you do with your data (King and Harrocks, 2010, 4).

Information about persons, intellectual property and partners must be treated with particular caution. To the extent that it appears third party data, the infor-mation should be anonymised. Third party data can, however, be complicated to define. The mapping of geographically specific information can be

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tive information in outfield businesses for two reasons. First, the right holders to different areas are known in the community; this implies that land informa-tion is personal informainforma-tion, and it can, to some degree, be sensitive. The in-dividual interviewed persons have to the degree that it was practically doable been allowed to check and comment their own interviews and the mappings I have derived from it, and the images where they are recognisable. The Nussir case impacts the landscapes of people who never chose this conflict but have to stand in it to protect the prospects of their own livelihood. Not all of them necessarily want to be public figures, but some of them do. I have chosen to anonymise some of the conversations. I have a responsibility to sort out care-fully the kind of information that belongs to the informal conversations and what is given me in the context of a research conversation, what is contextual and what is direct. I also have a responsibility to what I leave out.

Fig 3.2: Conversations on the outfield atlas gave valuable feedback to the visual interpretations of learnings from the fieldwork. Anne Berit Skum and Johan Henrik Skum, Áisaroaivi 2015.

3 . 6 A S S E M B L I N G A N D A N A L Y S I N G M U L T I -M O D A L D I S C O U R S E -M A T E R I A L

Through multimodal discourse analysis (Morrison 2010), I have combined prospective, power-sensitive, situated and assembling approaches to identify concrete and contested intersections between the interventions or perfora-tions of the mining companies, the supportive institutional apparatus and the attempts of the affected actors and their organisations to act in relation to such perforations. Although there are many sophisticated and technology-aided methods of discourse analysis, Peräkylä and Ruusovuori propose that, in many cases, an informal approach may be the best choice in research that focuses on written texts:

try to pin down their key themes and, thereby to draw a picture of the presuppositions and meanings that constitute the cultural world of which the textual material is a specimen. (Peräkylä and Ruusovuori, 2018, 530)

In the above quotation, the expression “to draw a picture” is used metaphorically. In multimodal communication, drawing is an act of communication. The documents that I analyse contain pictures, maps, diagrams and designs. I produce pictures, maps, diagrams and designs in my analysis, in addition to written analyses of the discourse.

As a “discursive site”, the Nussir prospect includes government documents, case documents and media accounts. It extends to include ongoing research:

the work of researchers from different disciplines that in turn might influence policy and landscapes elsewhere. While doing fieldwork, I met other

researchers with different approaches, who studied, published and talked about their research. I read their publications and chronicles I met actors with different interests and the discourses in the governmental sectors that they are affiliated with and heard interviews with them on the news. The discursive site of the Nussir prospect perforated the landscape of reindeer husbandry, also in the sense of making the pastoral community more accessible to researchers. When I write that the knowledge gaps conjured by extractive prospects attract knowledge producers, it is not only a figure of speech but also a highly concrete field observation. The discursive formation gravitating around the Nussir prospect and the public interest and contestations made it possible to study the multiple realities enacted in a perforated landscape.

Making the outfield atlases assembled the study and was a strategy to bring

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back into the social field the gestural, shape-making, drawerly capacities of a design approach, alongside textual descriptions and propositions. The outfield atlases were helpful for staging a setting for a semi-structured interview but not for structuring the conversation. The interviews became very long, and I learned things that I wanted to learn more about. To conduct such an analysis, I engaged in a social-material discursive practice, that is, first and foremost, a

“learning process”.

To write an academic text we need to write authoritatively, yet the author in the text needs to recognize the author as a learner. Making this challenge explicit, we propose to inhabit the figure of the careful, partial participant rather than the figure of the removed judging observer, through epistemic practice. (Brattland, Kramvig and Verran, 2018, 11)

In the pastoral community, the diagrams and mappings that I had made opened paths to conversations about traditional knowledge and interior discussions that I had not anticipated. Then, I had brought a set of printed drafts of the outfield atlases back into the field as a tool to focus the qualita-tive interviews, but now it was more in a mode of conversations, corrections of my interpretations. Drawing an interpretation of the stories told offered the opportunity to see what I heard and to show what I heard. Annotating the out-field atlases was a means to enhance the co-production of knowledge. Rather than a mapping of landscape practices, the atlases can be seen as an engine for inquiry and co-production of knowledge to move the landscape analysis process towards a ‘more accessible and values-based as a discursive activity’

(Stahlschmidt et al., 2017, 32). Thereafter, I made a new analysis of the print-ed copy of the atlas that was annotatprint-ed with notes made during the interviews and directly afterwards. Some of the maps and diagrams are printed alongside the field narratives in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, and some spreads of the annotated atlas are included in the analytic Chapters 7 and 8 in this thesis. The analyti-cal work and the modes of presenting the study included choosing between the potential texts in the empirical material and my field experiences. Thus, writing is just like mapping an act of power. When “writing” multimodally, this extends to considering how to select images, to deciding what sketches to develop further into maps.

3 . 7 C O N C L U S I O N T O C H A P T E R 3

In this chapter I have described a counter prospective approach as an iterative movement back and forth between ethnographically inspired field studies and detailed discourse analyses of documents, events and assessment matrices, in parallel tracking both seasonal livelihoods and industrialising activities. It is built through transdisciplinarity but it is not undisciplined, though, like “any-thing goes”, but an analysis of actual “any-things on maps, actual legally binding documents, actual conversations. A multi-method analysis demands a sense of fluid disciplinary transgression that follows the landscape controversies that flow over territorial and disciplinary borders.

In order to chart the implications of “migratory landscapes”, I assemble and appropriate seasonal cartographies from the natural sciences of the movements and spatial demands of migratory species on land, in the sea and in the air. I combine these with power-sensitive discourse analysis, in order to understand how prospects perforate the “landscape as polity” and to identify the various layers of landscape knowledge hidden in sector-oriented governance. In mineral prospecting, physical samples from drill holes are enrolled as arguments in the multimodal social discourse; as such, the physical landscape becomes discursive in its own right. I have situated myself in the voids generated by disputed prospects and carefully observed the discourses, avoidances, knowledge production and practices circling around them, and I have found qualitative traits and records of relations to and within landscapes that are brought to the negotiation table but subjugated in the course of the political decision-making processes.

Without the rich accounts of landscape that come from spending time there together with those who have tasks to do there—in the taskscape—you do not become sufficiently informed about what landscape controversy is all about. In addition to mapping, map analysis, sketching and photography, and diverse media production and analysis, active participation and participatory observation in outfield households, livelihoods and practices, I sought learning from multiple perspectives in environmental forums, conferences, and conversations.

In order to describe “landscape as prospect” and understand landscape as assemblages of possible futures, of different prospects, I employ prospective design approaches and techniques. With a counter prospective approach, I study landscape in the impact zone of a future mine, together with local and Indigenous people who are experts on the dynamics of their own landscapes,

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and with various skills at incorporating traditional knowledge into changing practices and changes in land use. As such, I aim to make a counter prospec-tive mapping of the landscape discourse. The prospecprospec-tive capacities of the ar-chitectural professions, aka the prospective arts, can be activated via counter mapping and lead to the emergence of counter prospecting as a multimodal and anticipatory discursive method.

Part II

Thematic chapters based on fieldwork, document and media studies.

The three chapters in this part describe the development of an Arctic mining prospect in the context of its externalities. Chapter 4 gave accounts from field trips through Fennoscandia and eastern Canada, studied the Nordic extractiv-ist discourse and encircled the Nussir prospect. Chapters 5 and 6 presented field narratives, document studies and mappings from Fiettar reindeer grazing district and Repparfjorden, alongside a study of Nussir ASA’s application process. The empirical chapters of my thesis give the reader access to narra-tive and visual, ethnographic, situated knowledge that I have represented in texts, maps and images.

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