Join us on Monday 9th September for our first colloquium of the year, given by Professor Klaus Dodds from Royal Holloway, University of London.
In Problematising Icy Geopolitics? Elemental, Metaphorical and Volumetric Reverberations, Prof. Dodds will explore ‘icy geopolitics’ and what it might tell us about how we treat substances like ice as geopolitical matter.
Ice is represented and experienced in a multitude of ways, from oral cultures of indigenous communities living and working in the Arctic and mountainous environments; this matters because ice as metaphor is often complicitous with the settler colonial framing of empty, unstable and ungoverned spaces.
The talk takes this icy interrogation and brings it into contact with the experiences and struggles of Arctic peoples and states alongside non-Arctic states as they seek to press their interests in the midst of ongoing melting and thawing. Icy geopolitics is being reconfigured; melting is said to be ‘triggering’ further expressions of territorial colonization and resource extraction and/or commitment towards indigenous autonomy, stewardship and conservation.
Professor Klaus Dodds works on geopolitics and security, media/popular culture, ice studies and the international governance of the Antarctic and Arctic.
The talk will be held in Geography Room 201.
Lunch will be served at 12 noon, please RSVP.
