After Ice

Cold Humanities for a Warming Planet

Foreword by Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin; Edited by Rafico Ruiz, Paula Schönach, and Rob Shields

UBC Press

As the climate warms and the hydrological cycle is disrupted, ice is no longer a reliable feature of higher latitudes or winter seasons. What are the human and nonhuman consequences of the planet’s waning capacity to cool? In other words, what comes after ice?

This collection examines the implications of the end of consistent freezing and thawing cycles. The cryosphere traditionally refers to areas where water is solid, such as places on the planet of snow, ice, and permafrost. Today, a new cryosphere is emerging that encompasses experiences generated by the uncertain horizons of melting ice, and whose future is increasingly determined by human behaviour. In this context, After Ice gathers experts in a wide range of disciplines – environmental history, game studies, Indigenous studies – to articulate aspects of the cold humanities. They investigate ice and its dynamic properties as a foundational element of Indigenous communities in the Arctic, as a commodity with technological and political value, and as a reflection of environmental change and the passage of time.

This original, thought-provoking exploration envisions ice not only as a phase of water but also as a milieu for semantic and embodied sensemaking. It asks us to consider how to define, describe, and materially characterize our warming world.

Researchers and students of the environmental humanities, media and cultural studies, environmental history, northern studies, and new materialisms will find this an important addition to their libraries.

RELATED TOPICS: Climate Change, Cultural Studies, Environmental History, Environmental Studies, History, Northern Studies, Water

After Ice will be useful to open a conversation about melting materialities under changing climates. Dolly Jørgensen, coeditor of Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments

In putting forward the concept of the cold humanities, this book makes a provocative contribution to the field of ice- and cold-related environmental humanities. It is full of excellent scholarship on cold themes and cold places. Adrian Howkins, coeditor of the Cambridge History of the Polar Regions

Rafico Ruiz is the associate director of research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier and coeditor, with Melody Jue, of Saturation: An Elemental Politics.

Paula Schönach is the senior adviser in sustainability at the Aalto University School of Business and the director of the CLIMATE-research program of the Strategic Research Council, both in Finland. With Esa Ruuskanen and Kari Väyrynen, she is a coeditor of Suomen ympäristöhistoria 1700-luvulta nykyaikaan (Environmental history of Finland from the eighteenth century to the present).

Rob Shields is the Henry Marshall Tory Research Chair and a professor of human geography and sociology at the University of Alberta. As well as authoring publications such as Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisations, The Virtual, and Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, he has conducted online projects such as wildspirits.ualberta.ca and is the founder of the journal Space and Culture.

Contributors: Hester Blum, Mark Carey, Alenda Y. Chang, Jeff Diamanti, Mél Hogan, Cymene Howe, Emma Kowal, Esther Leslie, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi, Márió Z. Nemes, Jessica O’Reilly, Liza Piper, Joanna Radin, Sarah T. Roberts, Juan Francisco Salazar, Rebecca J.H. Woods

Foreword: Cryopolitics after Ice / Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal

Introduction: A Cold Humanities after Ice / Rafico Ruiz, Paula Schönach, and Rob Shields

Part 1: Cold Humanities for the Arctic

1 On Cryohuman Relations / Cymene Howe

2 I, Nuligak and Indigenous Arctic Temporalities / Hester Blum

3 Freeze-up, Breakup, and Colonial Circulation / Liza Piper

Part 2: Warm, Cool, Icy, Changing Cold Social Conditions

4 Of Mammoths and Meat: Natural History and Artificial Refrigeration in the Nineteenth Century / Rebecca J.H. Woods

5 Materials after Ice Thaw: Methane, Microbes, Mud / Juan Francisco Salazar and Jessica O’Reilly

6 Archives Melting (and Meltdowns) / Mél Hogan and Sarah T. Roberts

Part 3: The Cultural Afterlives of Ice

7 Perishing Twice: On Play in a Warming World / Alenda Y. Chang