A public event will celebrate the launch of Ice Geographies: The Colonial Policies of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic, by assistant professor Jen Rose Smith (American Indian Studies).
The June 6 on-campus event will feature discussion of the book with four UW scholars: Shannon Cram (Interdisciplinary Arts, UW Bothell), Radhika Govindrajan (Anthropology), Dian Million (American Indian Studies), and Chandan Reddy (GWSS, CHID). Refreshments will be provided, and the event is sponsored by the Canadian Studies Center and the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
More information is available here.
About the book:
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?