PhD Alum Jen Rose Smith Publishes First Book

Alumni from our PhD program continue to produce pathbreaking interdisciplinary scholarship. Case in point: Dr. Jen Rose Smith has just published her first monograph, entitled Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke).

In Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?