ABSTRACT We explore purposive institutional change and the role of institutional entrepreneurs in initiating and driving relational learning processes. Supplementing new institutionalist theory with an institutional learning lens and using a longitudinal set of rich qualitative interview and observation data, we investigate how institutional entrepreneurs engage in transformational work to effectuate change in dominant institutional logics, thus transforming the institutional field. We propose that institutional entrepreneurs, by skilfully utilizing discursive and material practices to catalyze reciprocal learning processes, can introduce a new institutional logic and ensure its adoption and internalization by pivotal actors and stakeholders. We illustrate these dynamics using a municipality situated in Northern Finland as an example. The municipality has successfully managed to transform its food services as part of efforts to develop more sustainable regional economies and communities. It offers a rare case of successful purposive institutional change and an interesting best practice example both nationally and internationally.

ABSTRACT Owing to the claimed loss of meaning in modern societies, this article investigates how the experience of the sacred is disclosed in technological practices. The experience of the sacred is studied through four framings that approach the sacred as (i) extreme im/purity or sublimity, (ii) a religious framework, (iii) a sense of connection, and (iv) a cognitive experience related to skills. Sacred experiences may emerge in all technological practices, but their meaning is implied to be of a particularly fleeting kind in highly technological practices – measured by their increase in matter-energy throughput – and prone to cause the experience of alienation. Sacred experience in less technological practices is consequently proposed to hold the potential to offer a more sustained experience of meaning. However, the proper kinds of skills are essential to reach experiences of the sacred that may serve to restore life and its purpose.

ABSTRACT Sustainability is about carrying life on. If it is to mean anything, it must be for everyone and everything, and not for some to the exclusion of others. What kind of world, then, has a place for everyone and everything, both now and into the future? What does it mean for such a world to carry on? And how can we make it happen? To answer these questions, I take a closer look at what we mean by ‘everything’. I argue that it is not the sum of minimally existing entities, joined into ever larger and more complex structures, but a a fluid and heterogeneous plenum from within which things emerge as folds. How, then, does such an understanding of everything affect our concept of sustainability? It can no longer be understood in terms of the numerical balance of recruitment and loss. It is rather about lifecycles, about things’ lasting. In the sustainability of everything there is no opposition between stability and change. The more that global science has committed itself to a numerical calculus of sustainability, the more it has fallen to art to present the alternative. This has crucial implications for the ways we think about democratic citizenship.

ABSTRACT Handcraft skills provide premodern cultures with an experiential channel to encounter nature both in humans and in their environment. This essay sketches a dialectical overview – the roots of which can be traced via Hegel back to Heraclitus – of how handcrafts are entangled with other meaning-generating semiotic activities and participate in enriching the experiential content of verbal discourses as well. By eroding the handcraft culture, technical and social progress – realized in practice by the industrial revolution and ideologically supported by the movement of Enlightenment – has injured the experiential content of our language and thus impaired our natura experience.

ABSTRACT Professional expertise is a legitimate cornerstone of modern global culture. The unfolding of the polycrisis, however, arguably destabilizes expertise as a privileged and uniform position of knowledge production. Even sustainability expertise, while considered part of the solution, is arguably part of the problem, due to its structural links to environmentally detrimental technological practices. Hence technology relations in expertise are explored by autoethnography. Expert attitudes towards technology are traditionally demarcated between optimistic technocrats and critical humanists, but a third category is suggested, which embodies determined technology criticism, anti-colonialism and post-professional ethos. This peripheral expert position, labelled spurner, may seem dubious and dark from the point of view of paradigmatic expertise. But since the polycrisis calls for plural and inclusive modes of expertise, peripheral knowledge and skills should be seen as one end in the spectrum of possible sustainable expertise. True plurality means that hardly any final unification or mutual consensus in sustainability expertise seems plausible or even desirable. However, due to the polycrisis, many experts may have to reconsider what role their professions and technological progress in general play in the unfolding events. Recognizing peripheral “grey zone” expertise may foster such self-reflection in individual experts and in expert cultures.

ABSTRACT The quantitative archaeological record of the Åland Islands (Finland) indicates a population boom in the mid-sixth century CE. Yet the number of palynological investigations on Åland is limited, resulting in a knowledge gap of anthropogenic landscape modification generated by the land use that followed the increased population. This article presents the results of a pollen analysis from Lake Lavsböle Träsk in central Åland, covering the period from the end of the Bronze Age into the modern period. The results of this study provide evidence of continuous land use throughout the Iron Age and the medieval period, and the population boom during the sixth century CE is indicated in the pollen signal. Altogether we argue for an economy based on cereal cultivation, animal husbandry, and maritime resource utilization (e.g. seal hunting, fishing, and fowling) as well as trading. The results indicate a society able to manage risks connected to their subsistence strategies, in which versatility seems to have had a key role.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the role of knowledge and practices related to the natural environment in constructing and regenerating identities as Coastal Sámi across generations. The discussion draws on empirical material from a local community on the coast of Finnmark in northern Norway. To what extent are coastal Sámi identities today related to knowing specific landscapes? We explore how knowing a landscape through practical engagement and livelihood-related tasks in the local environment is part of identity regeneration in succeeding generations – from grandparents to grandchildren. Our discussion is situated in a growing field of academic and ethnopolitical contributions exploring Sámi knowledge and relationships to local landscapes and environments, drawing upon some key concepts in the broader literature on local knowledge and relational conceptions of knowledge and knowing in inter-generational transmission. We show how this transmission is performed as active re-generation through shared lived experiences of practice, as well as through narratives transmitted across generations. The empirical material analyzed here consists of narratives collected through interviews with members of three generations in eight families belonging to a predominantly coastal Sámi community in coastal Finnmark during 2018-2019.

ABSTRACT This article provides an exposé of the life and work of Anatoliy Yevgenyevich Geynts, in Norway known as Anatol Heintz. Heintz was born and raised in St Petersburg, became a Russian refugee after the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917–1918, and ended up in Norway with his family. Later Heintz became renowned in the world of science as a Professor, Academician, and one of the founding fathers of Norwegian palaeontology, as well as a well-known promoter of scientific knowledge among the common people in Norway. At the same time, he was an active participant in and organizer of scientific expeditions to Spitsbergen (Svalbard) in search of fish fossils, but he also became one of the pioneers in the protection of wild animals and establishment of natural parks on this Arctic archipelago. Heintz’s life is examined against the background of social and cultural processes that Russian emigrants faced in this so-called “first wave” of emigration in the twentieth century, processes of socio-cultural adaptation and integration into their new country of residence. The conditions for finding oneself and ways of preserving one’s Russianness in the large colonies of the Russian diaspora, which appeared in Berlin, Prague, and Paris, are compared with the conditions in the northern periphery of Europe and a small country like Norway. The paper focuses on what Anatol Heintz did to preserve his Russian identity, and how he simultaneously struggled to become fully recognized as a Norwegian citizen.

ABSTRACT We examine the historical toponymic system of the Russian Far North in the context of folklore traditions of Indigenous peoples of the North. Our methodology is narrative analysis, aimed at identifying the semantic features of toponyms, whose origins lie in traditional legends and tales. We treat toponyms as geocultural codes, which provide not only ethnocultural data but also geographic and spatial information. We present shared patterns in the naming practices of geo-objects among the Yukaghirs, Evens, and Yakuts (Sakha), and the ways that these practices are rooted in folklore. We also examine ethno-cultural differences in toponym naming among these three groups. We identify four broad strategies in the naming of geo-objects in northern regions: anthroponymic, commemoration of events, after sacred concepts, and after common household objects and concepts. In addition to linguistic information encoded by toponyms, it is also possible to establish extralinguistic information about the historical settlement of different peoples, contact among them, and their societal values. Such anthropological studies are relevant for onomastics and linguistic typology. Through the present study, we are able to gain a better understanding of Indigenous cultural development in the Russian Far North and the nature of inter-ethnic relations before written history.

ABSTRACT In 1928, the airship Italia, commanded by Umberto Nobile, crashed on the way back from the North Pole. The tragic outcome of his expedition interrupted the organization of significant Arctic explorations and generated a fracture between Mussolini’s regime and polar studies. The Fascist regime implicitly expressed its shame for its role in the whole unfortunate expedition and the subject became taboo in the entire country. Almost ten years later, in 1937, Norway invited all countries that had previously undertaken polar expeditions to participate in the first International Polar Exhibition (Internasjonal utstilling for polarforskning), planned to be held from May 1940. Considering the polemics after the 1928 Arctic expedition, the Norwegians’ eager efforts to solicit Italy’s participation in the exhibition may appear surprizing. Therefore, this work aims to better understand these dynamics, seeing the uncertainties surrounding Italy’s participation in the polar exhibition in light of Nobile’s pivotal role in the organization of Fascist Italy’s polar explorations.