TAI Bookshelf Podcast - Ruins of Arctic Infrastructures with Mia Bennett
Dr. Mia Bennett in Dettifoss, Iceland. Photo: Mia Bennett
Your favourite Arctic podcast is back for its third series! As always, co-hosts Liubov Timonina, Romain Chuffart and Saga Helgason chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. Tune in every month and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.
In this episode, Liuba and Romain had a conversation with Dr. Mia Bennett about aesthetics and infrastructural development in the Arctic. The three of them touched on everything from Mia’s writing process and the power of visual storytelling to sustainable development and promoting Indigenous rights. Exploring how the Arctic is viewed through the lens of climate change, Mia also talked about development narratives and the world already left behind by Anthropocene.
Mia is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington in the United States. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, through fieldwork and remote sensing, she researches the geopolitics of development in northern frontiers, namely the Arctic, Russian Far East, and the more remote corridors of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. She has conducted fieldwork along the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway in Canada’s Northwest Territories and is particularly interested in the role of Indigenous Peoples in leading infrastructure development in the North American Arctic. Mia received a Ph.D. in Geography from UCLA, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a Master’s in Philosophy in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. She has published extensively in both peer-reviewed journals and popular publications and edits a long-running blog on the Arctic at cryopolitics.com.
References and further readings:
- Bennett, Mia M. “The Making of Post‐Post‐Soviet Ruins: Infrastructure Development and Disintegration in Contemporary Russia.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12908.
- Bennett, Mia M. “Ruins of the Anthropocene: The Aesthetics of Arctic Climate Change.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 3 (2020): 921–31. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24694452.2020.1835457.
This episode was recorded in September 2021.