Contested Icescapes: Land, Politics, and Change on an Arctic Agricultural Frontier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contested Icescapes is an ethnographic and historical study of climate and agrarian change in the Northwest Territories, Canada. This dissertation examines how and in what ways marginal Arctic land has become an imaginary and material frontier for agriculture and considers the implications of the new frontier for rural and Indigenous lands and livelihoods. Through archival and ethnographic research, I contribute a deeply situated analysis of agricultural development and broader food systems change in this cold-climate region. I trace the entangled histories of settler colonialism, agricultural development, and climate change, and I demonstrate how these forces (re)shape the subjectivities and class relations of rural peoples, as well as their relationships with the state, Indigenous governments, society, and the environment.Throughout this dissertation, I develop the concept of “contested icescape,” which I use to analyze how various material, social, and political-economic forces assemble and reassemble to enable a Northwest Territories’ agricultural frontier at various historical moments. The contested icescape also refers to a discordance between frontier imaginary and frontier reality, and it is in this liminal space – shaped by local political contestations, increasingly uncertain ecological futures, and historical transformations in the regional political economy – that Northwest Territories’ agriculture continues to be characterized by smallholder family farmers and subsistence agriculture. Despite deep historical and political tensions between commercial smallholder famers and Indigenous subsistence growers, I demonstrate that both groups have been dispossessed of land and livelihoods as a result of new climate enclosures. I argue that rural and Indigenous peoples are adapting to new conditions of production and social reproduction, yet these adaptive practices are mediated by long standing colonial inequalities and transformations in the regional political economy. This dissertation underscores the importance of Indigenous and local environmental governance in climate justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".