Encounters Across Difference: The Digital Geographies of Inuit, the Arctic, and Environmental Management

• Main Author: Young, Jason Connel
• Other Authors: Elwood-Faustino, Sarah
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: climate change; digital geographies; environmental management; indigenous studies; Inuit; Information technology; Environmental justice; Geography; Arctic; Climate change; inuit
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/40169

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2017-06 There is broad consensus amongst scholars across a wide range of disciplines that digital technologies are having profound effects on micro- and macropolitical processes across the world. However, research into digital geographies has not rigorously examined the role of the Internet in bridging epistemological difference. Rather, most of this research has focused on the digital practices of a narrow group of elite users, situated in the Global North and largely lacking epistemological diversity from one another. Those few studies that do shift their focus to the Global South either take an anthropological view of a single society, or focus on unidirectional impositions of the Global North on the Global South. In doing so, these studies similarly ignore any bidirectional dialogue, or interepistemological encounters, between digital users situated in very different regions from one another. To overcome that gap, this project focuses on a dispersed and highly international set of digital practices. Specifically, I analyze the emergence of digital, interepistemological encounters related to environmental thinking and climate change politics related to the Canadian Arctic. Issues surrounding the Arctic environment are ideal for this study because they have attracted a global and diverse audience. Debates around Arctic environment often produce debates between two different groups – Western scientists and Canadian Inuit – that hold very different epistemological perspectives from one another. Inuit are increasingly using the Internet to broadcast their voices to broader audiences, and there is some evidence that digital technologies are successfully allowing them to overcome the spatial distance between their Arctic communities and geopolitical centers of power. However, it remains unclear how effective these tools have been for overcoming differences in epistemology between Inuit and other digital users. I begin by drawing on diverse strands of postcolonial and ...