Urban Wråkberg

Base

Name

Urban Wråkberg
Academic title(s)

PhD, M.Sc.Met.E.
Institute

UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Department

Dep. of Tourism Research and Northern Studies
Function

Professor
Address

Campus Kirkenes, PO Box 107
Zip code

9915
Country

Norway
Short biography

Urban Wråkberg is professor of Northern Studies and leader of the research group in this multidisciplinary field of study at the Arctic University of Norway. He has published in English, Swedish, Norwegian and Russian on the geo-economic drivers of industry and science in both polar regions, on the history and ideology of polar exploration and on the nexus between scientific and indigenous knowledge-formation. This research has included fieldwork in Svalbard and East Greenland. In the Scandinavian-Russian borderland of Subarctic Europe Wråkberg’s research has mainly focused issues of cultural heritage and the sustainability of tourism; the latter put into comparative perspective by research on the south Baltic Sea region and in Central Europe.
Recent publications

(selection)

Urban Wråkberg, “A Nordic state-industry governance system goes north: Oil and gas extraction in the Barents Sea” in: Carina Keskitalo, ed., Regional Dynamics: The Old North in a Changing World (forthcoming, Routledge).
Urban Wråkberg, “Northern crossroads: Tourism and cultural heritage in Subarctic and Central Europe” in: Peter Haugseth, Olga Ivanisheva & Urban Wråkberg, eds., High North Crossroads: Nordic-Russian Tourism, Heritage and Borderland Politics (forthcoming, Murmansk Arctic State University Press).
Peter Haugseth & Urban Wråkberg, “Tourism experiences of post-Soviet Arctic borderlands” in: Young-Sook Lee, Nina Prebensen & David Weaver, eds., Arctic Tourism Experiences: Production, Consumption & Sustainability. CABI, Wallingford, 2017, pp. 181-190.
Urban Wråkberg, “The Path-dependence of Russia’s Northern Industry and Some Aspects of Its Future Development” in: Vladislav Goldin & Tatyana Troshina, eds., International Relations in the European North and in the Arctic in the First Quarter of the 20th Century: Historical Experience and Contemporary Times. Northern (Arctic) Federal University, Arkhangelsk, 2015, pp. 304-313.
Urban Wråkberg & Karin Granqvist, “Decolonizing Technoscience in Northern Scandinavia: The Role of Scholarship in Sámi Emancipation and the Indigenization of Western Science”, Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014), pp. 81-92.
Dag Avango, Louwrens Hacquebord & Urban Wråkberg, “Industrial Extraction of Arctic Natural Resources since the Sixteenth Century: Technoscience and Geo-Economics in the History of Northern Whaling and Mining”, Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014), pp. 15-30.
Role in Tensions of Europe

Participant
Research interests

Security, Energy, Governance, Environment, Knowledge Networks, Financial Crises
Additional research interests

cross-border issues, tourism