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
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
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
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 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
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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