Arctic Icescapes: Negotiating Climate Change through Performance Practices

This dissertation considers cultural negotiations of climate change in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, especially the Inuit co-governed territory of Nunavut, Canada, through an analysis of material and conceptual “icescapes.” Icescapes are embodied encounters between humans and ice that are framed through performance (broadly construed to mean embodied, iterative, creative practices) and that create ecological relationships. This research focuses on interviews and 20th and 21st-century works of multiple mediums and genres, including film, literature, digital art, dogsledding, and biological research; it is methodologically rooted in performance, literary, and film studies, Indigenous studies, ecology/biology, gender and sexuality studies, and science and technology studies. This project contributes to understanding how global environmental concerns manifest within severely affected localities, increases awareness of the Canadian Arctic as a crucial part of American history and futurity, and models performance-based environmental research and advocacy. Performance has been an undertheorized form within the environmental humanities; this dissertation centers performance studies analyses which emphasize embodiment and illuminate modes of creative, immersive engagement with climate change as a conceptual and material process.Historically, dominant governmental and philosophical approaches to environmentalism in North America have been rooted in homogenizing visions of humanity. This dissertation works to correct for this deleterious generalization by attending to gender, race, and coalitional, transnational efforts toward environmental justice. This emphasis builds upon the insights of Kyle Powys Whyte, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, and interlocutors in Iqaluit, Nunavut who have argued that climate change (and other environmental imbalances) are constitutively intertwined with pre-existing structures of inequity, including racial capitalism and settler-colonialism. Though it is often positioned as a novel crisis and “rupture” in history, climate change is equally a manifestation of long economic and ideological histories. Arctic ecosystems and performance practices based in and upon those ecosystems are central to the past, present, and future of climate change communication. By orienting audiences materially and conceptually, icescapes can naturalize, problematize, and innovate ways of relating to the more-than-human world. These mediated encounters produce environmentally consequential dynamics between humans and nonhumans and shape widespread ethical imaginaries. This research deepens and diversifies how contemporary climate change might be understood and confronted.

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