TAI Bookshelf Podcast - Decay and Development in Arctic Kiruna with Eric Boyd

Eric Boyd at the Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in Gruvstadparken in Kiruna, Sweden. Photo: Eric Boyd

It is 2022 and TAI Bookshelf Podcast is back with a fourth series! As always, co-hosts Liuba Timonina and Romain Chuffart chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. This year, the podcast team is joined by new and returning co-hosts Victoria Bergström and Saga Helgason. Mariel Kieval also gets onboard to help with producing the episodes behind the scenes. Tune in every month and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.

In this episode, Liuba and Romain have a conversation with Eric Boyd about his fieldwork in Kiruna, in northern Sweden between 2020 and 2021. As an anthropologist, Eric explains how he talked with Kiruna residents about the sense of loss, absence, and lack of fate control they feel as the mining city is moved and rebuilt a few kilometers away by government-owned company LKAB. The trio chats broadly about finding best anthropological practices, palliative curation of the built environment, mourning and decay in colonial capitalism, and questioning the “Arctic” as an analytical lens to conduct scientific research.

Eric Boyd holds an undergraduate degree in environmental science from the University of Dundee and a Masters in anthropology, environment and development from University College London (UCL). After finishing his masters, Eric worked as a co-editor for the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) research group at UCL. Currently in the final year of his PhD with DurhamArctic Interdisciplinary Research Group, working among research groups within the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Eric’s research focuses on what social, political and economic formations can be discerned among the materiality of the ongoing ruination and resettlement of the arctic mining town Kiruna, in Swedish Lapland. Although he is unsure what an anthropologist is, or does, or says, Eric is a social anthropologist working across both the anthropology and geography of extraction and settler colonialism.

This episode was recorded in May 2022.