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

我的研究“认识北极熊米沙：斯瓦尔巴群岛的多元自然主义、传记和保护”是对人类如何遇到、理解和保护非人类生命的探索。这是一群北极熊科学家、电影制作人、摄影师、管理人员和饲养员在斯瓦尔巴群岛和英国进行了一年多的民族志田野调查的结果。它询问我们如何在21世纪与北极熊生活在一起，我们如何通过不同的数字和政治生态来感知和遇到它们，以及这如何影响我们对它们保护的概念。我们真正在保护什么，如何保护，为什么要保护？它借鉴了目前在人类地理学和环境社会科学方面关于研究、理解和保护人类世动物的工作。在这个术语为研究我们与自然世界的关系所做的概念性工作的基础上，本论文遵循这样的建议，即存在多种自然，而不是过时的自然-文化鸿沟。在这样做的过程中，它表明我们对非人类世界的理解也是多元的，并且取决于互动和参与的动态网络。因此，对于北极熊来说，人类如何了解它们是不同类型工作的协商产物，从自然科学家的净化任务，到纪录片制片人的“银幕性质”：他们的学科和技术。本文探讨了这些不同的群体、社区和行动者社会是如何认识斯瓦尔巴群岛的北极熊的，以及这些概念是如何对他们如何设想保护北极熊产生影响的。在过去三年的研究中，我一直在追踪一只名叫米沙的斯瓦尔巴熊的生活。她是一种非凡的动物，居住在朗伊尔城附近的一个当地家庭，在她的人类邻居的气氛中表现出新颖的行为。她的接近导致了她在我们的视觉文化中无处不在（也是其产物）。在过去的9年里，她几乎出现在每一部关于北极熊的主要野生动物纪录片中（BBC、ITV、Netflix等），还有无数的照片。我甚至在我们部门的博物馆礼品店出售的明信片上找到了她。挪威极地研究所的科学家也曾4次捕捉到她，给她戴上了标签和无线电项圈，她的样本和数据集为了解斯瓦尔巴群岛的人口提供了宝贵的见解：他们的流动性、饮食和污染物污染。它与人类的亲密关系塑造了它的生活，甚至导致了两只幼崽的死亡。支持我的研究是新的方法论工具的发展，以参与人类与熊的关系的多样性。我进一步发展了Krebber & Roscher（2018）关于“动物传记”的工作，以研究人类讲述非人类生命的多样性，同时也关注代理、作者和影响的问题。我的研究探索了个体北极熊的生活被讲述和影响的多种不同的方式。在此过程中，我展示了对北极熊有多少可能的理解——它们如何代表不同群体的不同事物。这些理解本身位于重要的学科、技术和政治历史/想象之中。从冷战时期的外交，到21世纪的气候否认，从野生动物监测设备的发明，到摄影人员的图像捕捉技术，米沙所处的政治和数字生态不仅影响着我们对她的物种的认识，也影响着她的生活方式。北极熊的保护，甚至北极熊本身，都是在我们的遭遇中形成的。这项奖学金是一个很好的机会，可以将这项研究与学术界和非学术界的观众交流，并影响学者、从业者（在斯瓦尔巴群岛和英国）和公众对北极熊保护的想象和实践。

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.