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Paper short abstract:

Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation extracts one of the world's highest concentration of iron ore on Baffin Island, some of which is destined for low carbon steel manufacturing in Germany. This multimodal project points a lens at Baffinland's corporate HQ to locate Arctic mining activity in Toronto.

Paper long abstract:

Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation extracts some the world's highest concentration of iron ore from Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Some of the ore is destined for German steel manufacturers developing low carbon steel in a hydrogen-based steel manufacturing process that requires high grade iron ore. Indeed, the iron ore extracted on Baffin Island is touted as key in global efforts to transition to a carbon-free steel manufacturing process, which currently accounts for 25 percent of global industrial emissions. This multimodal project is comprised of photo and video documentary images and a critical paper. The images look at Baffinland's corporate HQ to locate Arctic mining activities in the southern suburbs of Toronto while the paper critically examines global efforts to create "green" steel. The images specifically look at the corporation's departments, such as sales, marketing, engineering, and communications, as the location of extractive activity while the paper unpacks the colonial dynamics at play in which resources continue to be extracted from the periphery for the benefit of a core and to the detriment of local communities, regardless of its green qualities. This project is part of a dissertation that takes Toronto, a southern city in Canada, as an Arctic landscape, given its outsized influence over Arctic issues.