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Accepted Paper:
Northern exposure: materializing infrastructures of coldness and silence in the European Arctic
Roger Norum
(University of Oulu)
This talk investigates the imaginaries, practices and materialities of coldness and silence in the European Arctic.
Paper long abstract:
The High Arctic has long been imagined as a frigid, silent and remote space, devoid of human presence and populated only by nature's dark forces. The binary relationship between sound/silence and warmth/cold is reproduced extensively in common understandings of wilderness and the experience of wilderness spaces. However, coldness, unlike darkness and silence which are often understood to be absences of light and sound, is a presence of material experiences of natural phenomena such as wind and precipitation. In this talk, I explore cold not as mere absence of heat, but rather a renewable resource that exists across multiple, diverse social and nature-based forms, carrying with it multiple significations. Through an investigation of how the material and symbolic infrastructures of coldness and silence give them meaning as they are produced, consumed and experienced in place, I deconstruct the expectations of the two experiential phenomena through their wider social and cultural processes, to show them to be fundamental aspects of everyday life in the North, cultivating them as a utilizable immaterial resources. Through playing and experimenting with new constellations of mixed methods from across several disciplines, I show how novel forms of observation and documentation might effectively encapsulate the significance of cold and silence, and show how researchers can implement a more nuanced understanding of their significance in everyday life.