Defining and Living with Sea Ice
My research on the ocean and, in particular, my efforts to rethink an assumed division of the world between land-as-territory and its oceanic negation, soon led me to develop a particular interest in areas of the ocean that are less-than-liquid, namely the frozen ocean of the circumpolar Arctic. Just as the ocean adds new dimensions to how we think of land (a key driver of my Wet Ontologies project), sea ice further complicates the idealised land-water binary that blinds our ability to think with the ocean as it permeates our lives.
Much of my research on sea ice has been channeled through the ICE LAW Project, which I directed from 2014 thorugh 2019 and which, from 2016 through 2019, was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The ICE LAW Project investigated the potential for a legal framework that acknowledges the complex geophysical environment in the world’s frozen regions and explored the impact that an ice-sensitive legal system would have on topics ranging from the everyday activities of Arctic residents to the territorial foundations of the modern state. Key participants in the project, besides myself, included Claudio Aporta, Gavin Bridge, Aldo Chircop, Kate Coddington, Stuart Elden, Stephanie Kane, Timo Koivurova, Jessica Shadian, and Anna Stammler-Gossmann. For more on the ICE LAW Project, in addition to perusing its website, see the history published in Current Developments in Arctic Law, 2018 (the link opens a PDF of the entire issue – see the ICE LAW article at page 110), as well as the Final Report filed with the Leverhulme Trust. The ICE LAW Project directly and indirectly spawned a number of outputs (see the project’s website), but a summative piece that brings together many of its insights is:
- Navigating the structural coherence of sea ice (with Greta Ferloni, Claudio Aporta, Gavin Bridge, Aldo Chircop, Kate Coddington, Stuart Elden, Stephanie C. Kane, Timo Koivurova, Jessica Shadian, & Anna Stammler-Gossmann), in Laws of the Sea [I. Braverman, ed.], 2022 | Website and link to open-access publication
My other main body of work on sea ice has largely focused on the Norwegian (and, to a lesser extent, Canadian) contexts, and much of this has been written in collaboration with Berit Kristoffersen. Key publications here include:
- “The ice edge is lost….nature moved it”: mapping ice as state practice in the Canadian and Norwegian North (with Berit Kristoffersen, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2017) | PDF (open access) | Companion blogpost
- Placing territory on ice: Militarization, measurement, and murder in the High Arctic (with Johanne Bruun, in Territory Beyond Terra [K. Peters, P. Steinberg, & E. Stratford, eds.], 2018 | Website
- (Un)frozen spaces: exploring the role of sea ice in the marine socio-legal spaces of the Bering and Beaufort Seas (with Kristen Shake, Karen Frey, & Deborah Martin, Journal of Borderland Studies, 2018) | PDF (behind paywall)
- Edges and flows: exploring legal materialities and biophysical politics of sea ice (with Berit Kristoffersen & Kristen Shake, in Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea [I. Braverman & E.R. Johnson, eds.], 2020) | Website
I also have had the honour of supervising a number of awesome PhD students who, in very different ways, have explored the ways that we know, map, and otherwise represent icy environments. So keep your eyes out for emergent work on the topic by my former students Johanne Bruun, Ingrid Medby, and Laura Seddon and current students Greta Ferloni and Danae Kontou.
Beyond sea ice, I have a number of other Arctic research interests that can (somewhat arbitrarily) be divided into Politics & Law; Culture & Imaginaries; Environment & Development; and Education & Interdisciplinarity.
Arctic Politics and Law
In addition to the ICE LAW proect and my work on the legal delimitation of the Marginal Ice Zone, my work with IBRU: Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research often focuses on the Arctic, most notably in production and publicity surrounding our map of Arctic maritime jurisdictions. Beyond IBRU, some of my publications on Arctic law and politics include:
- Steering between Scylla and Charybdis: The Northwest Passage as territorial sea (Ocean Development & International Law , 2014) | Open Access ‘Green’ PDF
- Covering Kiruna: A natural experiment in Arctic awareness (with Johanne Bruun & Ingrid Medby), in Polar Geography, 2014 | Open Access ‘Green’ PDF
- U.S. Arctic policy: Reproducing hegemony in a maritime region, in International Relations and the Arctic: Understanding Policy and Governance [R. Murray & A. Dey Nuttall, eds.], 2014 | Website
- Maintaining hegemony at a distance: The U.S. Arctic Region Policy Presidential Directive of 2009, in Polar Geopolitics? Knowledge, Resources, and Legal Regimes [R. Powell & K. Dodds, eds.], 2014 | Website
- The Arctic Council after Kiruna (with Klaus Dodds), in Polar Record, 2015 | PDF (behind paywall)
I also occasinally engage in applied work concerning the United Kingdom’s Arctic policy, for instance giving evidence before the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Arctic and contributing to the discussion paper on ‘The Arctic and the U.K.: Climate, Research and Engagement‘.
More recently, I have undertaken work in this area through my involvement in the GEOSEAS (Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Maritime Spatial Disputes in the Arctic) project led by Andreas Østhagen.
Arctic Culture and Imaginaries
A continual theme in my research on the Arctic is that outsiders’ attempts to govern the North are driven in part by their perceptions of the Arctic as an ‘exceptional’ region. This was a central theme in the ‘Territorial Imaginaries of the Arctic’ project (funded by the International Council for Canadian Studies, the US National Science Foundation, and the European Commission), whose outputs included:
- Contested sovereignty in a changing Arctic (with H. Gerhardt, J. Tasch, S.J. Fabiano, R. Shields), in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2010 | PDF (behind paywall)
- Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North (with J. Tasch, H. Gerhardt, A. Keul, & E. Nyman), I.B.Tauris / Bloomsbury, 2015 | Website
The significance of the Arctic as an imagined place also has been a theme in a pair of pieces on the concept of the ‘Polar Mediterranean’:
- Mediterranean metaphors: Connections, separations, and fluidities in
the “new Mediterraneans” of the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, in Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (J. Anderson & K. Peters, eds.), 2014 | Website - Europe’s ‘others’ in the Polar Mediterranean, in Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2016 | PDF (behind paywall)
Most recently, my research on culture and imaginaries in the Arctic has been catalysed through involvement in the Mediated Arctic Geographies project, led by Johannes Riquet and funded by the Academy of Finland, and the Exploring Arctic Soundscapes project, sponsored by Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study and co-led by myself, Robert Baxter and Eric Skytterholm Egan.
Arctic Environment and Development
Issues of economic development, resource extraction, and the maintenance (and enrichment) of livelihoods amidst changing national growth strategies and turbulent global enviromental conditions are never far from the surface in my Arctic research and writing. My economic-orientated works on the Arctic have generally focused on the Norwegian petroleum economy, as part of my ongoing collaboration with Berit Kristoffersen:
- Building a blue economy in the Arctic Ocean: Sustaining the sea or sustaining the state (with Berit Kristoffersen), in The Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic: Reconfiguring Identity, Space, and Time [U.P. Gad & J. Strandsbjerg, eds.], 2018) | Website
- Time for oil: Competing petrotemporalities in Norway’s Lofoten/Vesterålen/Senja archipelago (with Berit Kristoffersen & Gavin Bridge), in Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures [F. Polack & D. Farquharson, eds.], 2022 | Website
I am also engaging environment and development issues as Co-PI on the Carving out Climate Testimony project co-led by Jen Bagelman and Karla Jessen Williamson.
Arctic Education and Interdisciplinarity
In addition to my leadership of the Durham Arctic Research Centre for Training and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (DurhamARCTIC), I have long been involved with the University of the Arctic (UArctic), a consortium of over 200 universities in and beyond the Arctic that facilitates Arctic education and research. In 2022, I was named UArctic Chair in Political Geography in honour of my work in resarch and education on Arctic politics.
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