Organisers :
Department of Geography & Durham Energy Institute, Durham University.
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.
Abstract :
Competition over resources, land and people in the Arctic have recently increased following the effects of climate change on local, regional and national political systems. Resource multinational corporations, national States as well as regional and local socio-economic actors are now competing for the right to control the access to these ore-rich frozen landscapes. However, this is more than a simple contest for ownership of space. It is indeed the continuation of a historical phenomenon of neo-colonialisation which has seen the North’s indigenous peoples dispossessed of their land in order to facilitate the continuous accumulation of capital in the hands of external actors (Harvey, 2003).
Following this trend, it has been emphasised that Arctic States are now attempting to define the North’s identity solely in terms of potentialities for future economic development (Sejersen, 2015). This simply renders the indigenous interpretation of tradition, of the past as alive and ontologically part of Arctic space, obsolete. This is particularly true with regards to a shared view, among non-indigenous Arctic actors, of nature as subservient to the social world and to its economic and political needs. In practice, this has taken the form of Arctic geopolitical entities such as Canada or the EU actively seeking to claim and govern ‘their’ Arctic space. In order to do so, they have implemented sustainable development policies, which in effect aim to facilitate the exploration and exploitation of Arctic resources.
In line with indigenous interpretations, this project sees Arctic nature as (a) non-human being(s) endowed with multiple agencies and asks, rather provocatively, whether sustainable development in the Arctic is possible? Drawing from an innovative decolonial epistemological stance (Smith, 2012) the organisers of this session call for a collection of papers that can help understand the interplay between the State (and/or States), multinational resource exploitation corporations, indigenous peoples and non-human actors in the shaping, implementation and functioning of these sustainable development strategies and their effects on nature. We hope to better understand the nexus between the political economy, geography and ecology of the Arctic in the context of these co-occuring, sometimes opposing, often dominating material-semiotic systems. The main outcome of this session will be to develop a comprehensive account of power/knowledge dynamics related to environmental change in the Circumpolar North.
Different perceptions of Arctic environment, development and social movements (Peet and Watts 1996) as well as [sic] contextual, conflictual, consensual and messy spatialities of polar geopolitics are all relevant to the session (Powell and Dodds 2014). Theoretical and methodological approaches should therefore elaborate on the multiple epistemological groundings that give rise, in a post-colonial context, to various practices of governance via strategies of territorialisation and subjectivation (Elden, 2013; Foucault, 1980, 1993; Coulthard, 2014). We are particularly interested in the process that give rise to human and non-human materialities that inscribe the phenomenological development of resource frontiers in the historical emergence of State/corporate behaviour towards nature and Arctic space and place (Nuttall, 2010; Bridge and Le Billion, 2013; Bridge, 2009; Steinberg, 1995; Cronon, 1995; Mitchell, 2011).
Questions exploring Arctic space and place include but are not limited to the following :
- What practices of governance control Arctic space and place?
- How are practices conceived across time and space?
- By whom or what are such practices conceived?
- What values are at stake in the development of Arctic space and place?
- How are subjectivities expressed and politicised in practices of governance?
- What ‘other’ identities are apparent in practices of governance?
- Has there always been an ‘Arctic’ space and place?
References :
Bridge, G. and Le Billon, P. (2013) Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bridge, G. (2009) ‘Material Worlds: Natural Resources, Resource Geography and the Material Economy.’ Geography Compass 3 (3) 1217-1244.
Coulthard, S.G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Cronon, W. (1995) Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Elden, S. (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1993). ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.’ Political Theory 21 (2) 198-227.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings. London: The Harvester Press.
Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy. London and New York: Verso.
Nuttall, M. (2010) Pipeline Dreams: people, environment, and the Arctic energy frontier.Copenhagen: IWGIA.
Peet, R. and Watts, M. J. (1996) Liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements. London: Routledge.
Powell, R. and Dodds, K. (2014) Polar Geopolitics? Knowledges, resources and legal regimes. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Sejersen, F. (2015) Future-makers in the Arctic. A critical view on globalisation, urbanisation and change. Keynote, Aalborg, August 12-15, 2015 at Postgraduate summer school “Change and Continuation in the Arctic,” University of Aalborg.
Steinberg, P. E. (2001) The Social Construction of Oceans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, L.T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd Edition. London: Zed Books.
