Knowing Misha the Polar Bear: Multi-naturalism, biography, and conservation in Svalbard.

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My research, "Knowing Misha the polar bear: multi-naturalism, biography and conservation in Svalbard" is an exploration of how humans encounter, understand, and look to conserve non-human life. It is the result of over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, in Svalbard and the UK, with groups of polar bear scientists, filmmakers, photographers, managers, and keepers. It asks how we live with polar bears in the 21st century, how we perceive and encounter them through different digital and political ecologies, and how this shapes how we conceptualise their conservation. What are really conserving, how, and why? It draws upon current work in more-than-human geography and the environmental social sciences about studying, understanding, and conserving animals in the Anthropocene. Building upon the conceptual work that this term does for examining our relationship to the natural world, this thesis follows the proposal that there are multiple natures in place of the antiquated idea of a Nature-Culture divide. In doing so, it shows that our understandings of non-human worlds are also multiple, and contingent on dynamic networks of interactions and engagements. For polar bears, therefore, how humans come to know them is the negotiated product of different types of work, from the purifying tasks of natural scientists, to the 'screen-natures' of documentary filmmakers: their disciplines and technologies. This thesis asks how these different groups, communities, and societies of actors come to know polar bears in Svalbard, and how these conceptions are 'made to matter' for how they come to envisage their conservation. Throughout the last 3 years of research I have been tracing the life of an individual Svalbard bear named Misha. She is an extraordinary animal, inhabiting a local home-range near Longyearbyen and exhibiting novel behaviours amid the atmospheres of her human neighbours. Her proximity has resulted in (and is the product of) her ubiquity within our visual cultures. She appears in nearly every major wildlife documentary about polar bears for the last 9 years (BBC, ITV, Netflix etc) and innumerable photographs. I even found her on a postcard sold in the museum giftshop of my department. She has also been captured 4 times by Norwegian Polar Institute scientists, fitted with tags and radio collars, and her samples and datasets contribute valuable insights into the Svalbard population: their mobilities, diets, and pollutant contamination. Her proximity to humans has shaped her life, and even resulted in the deaths of two of her cubs. Underpinning my research is the development of novel methodological tools to engage with the multiplicity of human-bear relations. I further develop Krebber & Roscher's (2018) work on 'animal biography' to study the multiplicity of human tellings of non-human life, whilst also being attentive to questions of agency, authorship, and affect. My research explores the multiple and contrasting ways that the life of an individual polar bear is told and affected. In doing so, I demonstrate how numerous understandings of polar bears are possible - how they represent different things to different groups. These understandings are themselves situated within significant disciplinary, technological, and political histories/imaginaries. From Cold War diplomacy, to 21st century climate denial, and from the invention of wildlife monitoring equipment, to the image-capture techniques of camera crews, Misha inhabits political and digital ecologies that not only influence our conceptualisation of her species but also affect how her life is lived. Polar bear conservation, and even polar bears themselves, are shaped amid our encounters.This fellowship is a great opportunity to communicate this research to academic and non-academic audiences and to impact the imaginations and practices of polar bear conservation for scholars, practitioners (in Svalbard and the UK), and publics.