On the Fluidity of Grounds: Sea Ice and Digital Mediation of Inuit Experience

• Published in: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
• Main Author: Vardy, Mark
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2015
• Subjects: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering; Arctic; Climate change; inuit; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/topia.32.159; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/topia.32.159

The decline of sea ice is one of the most visible markers of climate change in the Arctic, but much more than the subject of a scientific anomaly, sea ice constitutes Inuit territory and is foundational to a way of life. The threatened vitality of the foundations of Inuit homeland raises the ethical and political question of how populations in southern Canada should respond, a question which is complicated by the lack of proximity. The digitally mediated Inuit Siku (Sea Ice) Atlas (Laidler, 2011) can impart singular experiences of sea ice, and is treated in this paper as a substantive example of vital mediation (Kember and Zylinska, 2012). The paper addresses the fluidity of ground as both a material fact and theoretical postulate by considering theories of vitalism, radical democracy, and Chakrabarty’s (2012) conception of political subjectivity as three disjunctive registers, which includes human agency as a geophysical force.