Preface

Arctic areas have seen a boom in tourism during the last few decades, which has led both to an increasing amount of business opportunities, jobs and economic well-being, but also to increased recognition that the development of tourism in the North comes with unforeseen challenges to indigenous and local communities and non-human nature. Therefore, a variety of perspectives from the social sciences, the humanities as well as from science address tourism in the Arctic from their respective angles, asking new questions and experimenting with new ideas. This has led to the traditional business perspectives to be complemented by alternative theoretical approaches highlighting communities, geographical imaginaries and spatial relations, also featuring the application of recent theoretical reasoning within an Arctic context. The volume at hand brings together creative thinking across “tourism” disciplines in order to set a research agenda for future Arctic tourism that recognizes tourism as one future storyline for the Arctic - a narrative embedded in local human and non-human communities.