How the media frames Arctic mining as a rush

Rachael Lorna Johnstone, Professor at the Faculty of Law and newly appointed Research Director at the University of Akureyri, is among the authors of a new study examining how the media frames mining in the Arctic.

She co-authored the study with Alexandra Middleton of the University of Oulu, Rikke Østergaard of Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland, and Anna Karlsdóttir of the University of Iceland.

A race for Arctic resources

The article shows that media coverage of Arctic mining frequently emphasises urgency or presents resource extraction as a race.

At the same time, coverage tends to focus on economic consequences and risk of conflict, while paying little or no attention to the rights of Indigenous Peoples whose homelands encompass the areas where mining takes place.

A strategic resource base or an Indigenous homeland?

By constructing a narrative of existential urgency driven by external threats, media discourse can fix the meaning of the Arctic as a strategically and economically important resource-base while overlooking the Arctic as an Indigenous homeland.

The researchers describe this as “hegemonic fixing”. Although Indigenous Peoples are visible in the discourse as stakeholders, their political agency – particularly their right to grant or deny Free, Prior and Informed Consent to resource extraction – becomes a blind spot when strategic urgency is prioritised.

Open-access research

The peer-reviewed article is published in The Extractive Industries and Society. It is available through open access and can be found here.