Progressive Geographies

Richard C. Powell, Studying Arctic Fields: Cultures, Practices and Environmental Sciences – now out with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

In recent years the circumpolar region has emerged as the key to understanding global climate change. The plight of the polar bear, resource extraction debates, indigenous self-determination, and competing definitions of sovereignty among Arctic nation-states have brought the northernmost part of the planet to the forefront of public consideration. Yet little is reported about the social world of environmental scientists in the Arctic. What happens at the isolated sites where experts seek to answer the most pressing questions facing the future of humanity?

Portraying the social lives of scientists at Resolute in Nunavut and their interactions with logistical staff and Inuit, Richard Powell demonstrates that the scientific community is structured along power differentials in response to gender, class, and race. To explain these social dynamics the author examines the history and vision of the Government of Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf Program and John Diefenbaker’s “Northern Vision,” combining ethnography with wider discourses on nationalism, identity, and the postwar evolution of scientific sovereignty in the high Arctic. By revealing an expanded understanding of the scientific life as it relates to politics, history, and cultures, Studying Arctic Fields articulates a new theory of field research.

Advocating for a greater appreciation of science in the remote parts of the world, Studying Arctic Fields is an innovative approach to anthropology, environmental inquiry, and geography, and a landmark statement on Arctic science as a social practice.

Introduction
1. Scientific Sovereignty, Nordicity, and the Canadian Nation
2. Between Observation and Experiment in Arctic Fieldwork
3. Base Cultures: The Spatial Organization of a Research Station
4. Performing the Arctic Scientific Human
5. Canada Day in Qausuittuq: Dramatizing Inuit Encounters
6. Emotional Practices and Play: The Quotidian Provenance of Logistics
7. Hidden Voices? Competing Visions and the Everyday Governance of Arctic Science
Epilogue: Requiem for a Canadian Arctic? | 188

Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on – forum in Political Geography with Philip E.Steinberg, Sam Page, Jason Dittmer, Banu Gökariksel, Sara Smith, Alan Ingram and Natalie Koch

Just finished reading Alex Danchev’s very interesting Georges Braque: A Life. Among other things, I was struck by just how much archival work he did. Here’s his comment from the acknowledgements on research and French archives:

Researching is adventuring into the unknown. Blandine Chambost has been my skirmisher, interpreter, and conductor into the strange ways of French archives (‘What proof do you have, monsieur, that we hold these papers?’) and the Byzantine workings of the Bibliothèque Nationale, ‘which in both its entire layout and its near-ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy’, as the late W.G. Sebald so aptly remarked (p. 412).

End times philosophy interviews: the first 302

Thematically organised interviews at 3am Magazine. Thanks to David Beer for the link.

For a Marxist Poetics of Science: An Interview with Esther Leslie at the Verso blog or in Historical Materialism

In this career-spanning interview with George Souvlis, Esther Leslie discusses Walter Benjamin, animated film, the history of color, the Historical Materialism project, and the commemoration of the revolutionary past.