Author Meets Critic
Ice Geographies and Critical Demography
Jen Rose Smith, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Washington
Parrington Hall Room 360
To Join By Zoom: Register HERE
05/29/2026
12:30-1:30 PM PT
360 Parrington Hall
Co-Sponsor(s):
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, 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?
Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) is assistant professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic was published with Duke University Press and she has also published in EPD: Society and Space, The Geographical Journal, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes language and cultural revitalization gatherings.