Arctic Abstractive Industry

Photo by Christopher Michel, licensed under CC BY.

The Arctic is a region that is being dramatically altered through climate change, even as extractive industries and the nations that rely on them frame the Arctic as an alternatively valuable or risky frontier. The essays in this Hot Spots series provide an ethnographic unmasking of some of the normative projects that today’s rush for the Arctic entails. They highlight the increasing speed of change in the Arctic; the complex relationship between Arctic inhabitants and their land/seascape; and the possibility of a postdiscursive turn in which managing Arctic risk relies on the shaping of aesthetic experience. Our use of the word abstractive both evokes and departs from extractive. It gestures toward the stakes of rendering embodied knowledge explicit and redistributing calculative capacities from humans to technical systems, thereby instantiating the conditions for control over a valuable and vulnerable North.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North

Introduction: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North

Above sixty-six degrees north of the Equator lies the Arctic, a region that has been altered dramatically through climate change. As a result of the opening of ... More

The Biggest, the Best, the Most, the Last: Alaska on the Edge

The Biggest, the Best, the Most, the Last: Alaska on the Edge

These days, talk about the far North is saturated with superlatives. Nowhere is this more evident than in Alaska, a place that sells itself as the last frontier... More

Constructing an Arctic Laboratory

Constructing an Arctic Laboratory

Oil spills have taken on considerable political significance in recent years. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 was a case in point, since it resulted in the i... More

The Unbuilt Environments of Arctic Offshore Oil and Gas Development

The Unbuilt Environments of Arctic Offshore Oil and Gas Development

The image of the future Arctic as a booming oil and gas province has become one of the strongest representations of the region (Powell and Dodds 2014; Steinberg... More

Discovering Opportunities for Adaptation in the Arctic

Discovering Opportunities for Adaptation in the Arctic

The ambitious December 2015 agreement of the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate... More

Haunting Afterlives of the Gulag in the Siberian Sub-Arctic

Haunting Afterlives of the Gulag in the Siberian Sub-Arctic

What experiences and senses of place emerge from the legacies of modern industrial projects that have consumed millions of human destinies through incarcerated ... More

Can One See the Arctic from Vienna?

Can One See the Arctic from Vienna?

The colonial history of the Arctic has resulted in a series of reframings and relocations of the people and places that constitute the circumpolar North. Even i... More

The Making of Resource Spaces in Greenland

The Making of Resource Spaces in Greenland

A resource frontier is being imagined, made, and pushed back in Greenland. International energy and mining companies have identified the potential for this self... More

Imagining a Postpetroleum Arctic

Imagining a Postpetroleum Arctic

As tensions mount across the Arctic concerning the utilization of natural resources and the implications for ecologies and their social connectedness, we bring ... More

Valuing Diversity in the Study of Arctic Change

Valuing Diversity in the Study of Arctic Change

Oil extraction and climate change are the most prominent themes in impact studies of Arctic Alaska. The former has been written about for almost five decades (B... More

Shapeshifters, the Petrostate, and the Making of Uncertain Futures in the Canadian North

Shapeshifters, the Petrostate, and the Making of Uncertain Futures in the Canadian North

Sitting in a community hall in the Sahtu region of the central Mackenzie Valley in the Northwest Territories, a Dene grandfather and hunter spoke before the Joi... More

Russia’s Arctic Natural Gas and the Definition of Sustainability

Russia’s Arctic Natural Gas and the Definition of Sustainability

Sustainability as a corporate governance objective entered the Russian energy sector in the early 2000s. Major state-owned companies began publishing corporate ... More

Establishing Shared Knowledge about Globalization in Asia and the Arctic

Establishing Shared Knowledge about Globalization in Asia and the Arctic

Shared knowledge about globalization in the Arctic is driven, in part, by economic growth in Asia and by increasing interaction between Arctic communities and A... More

Documenting Koryak: Endangered Languages and the Legacy of Arctic Colonialism

Documenting Koryak: Endangered Languages and the Legacy of Arctic Colonialism

Language endangerment is caused by brutal histories of colonialism and continues due to the subtle, ongoing oppression of indigenous people. This is true in Sib... More

Pluralities of Governance in the Russian Arctic

Pluralities of Governance in the Russian Arctic

Under what pretext can oil, natural gas, coal, gold, and diamonds be extracted from under the permafrost on indigenous reindeer pastures or hunting and fishing ... More