Phygital Arctic – rethinking Arctic tourism through digitalization

Arctic tourism is increasingly shaped by Arctification, a process through which stereotypical representations of the Arctic as a remote, snow-covered wilderness are attached through tourism and related imaginaries, practices, and products to places that were not previously considered as being Arctic. These representations can contribute to homogenization, and constrained development pathways. While sustainability needs have been widely examined in Arctic tourism, the role of digital technologies in shaping how Arctic places are produced, experienced, and rendered sustainable remains under-researched. This conceptual paper introduces Phygital Arctic Tourism (PAT) as an analytical framework for examining how Arctic tourism is assembled through intertwined physical and digital processes. Building on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and relational perspectives on place, the paper extends existing Arctic tourism frameworks by conceptualizing digital technologies as material actors in the production of tourism experiences, imaginaries, and sense of place. Furtheremore, it introduces Counter-Arctification as a concept foregrounding processes through which dominant Arctic imaginaries are challenged and pluralized. With examples from museums and visitor centers this paper advances a conceptual lens for analyzing how Arctic tourism is produced, mediated, and transformed in the digital era, offering new directions for research on sustainability, sense of place, and tourism development in Arctic regions.