Back to Frozen Earth: Permafrost in Social Theory and Beyond

If permafrost could once be seen as a silent backdrop to human life, the current ecological crisis troubles that notion. In the context of ecological devastation, permafrost is gaining new visibility. Yet, contemporary discussions around permafrost tend to present it as an environmental threat first and foremost, privileging the view of permafrost as a force that accelerates climate change and disrupts sociomaterial worlds built on its surface. In the words of anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, “we all live on permafrost” (2021), but the permafrost we live on is storied as barely livable.

In response to this environmental urgency, social scientists and humanities scholars have finally turned their attention to permafrost, putting forward an idea that it is far more than a mere layer of frozen ground. Since permafrost has long been entwined with processes of environmental extraction and colonization (Chu, 2020), these scholars approached permafrost as an anthropogenic phenomenon not divided from the relations of power. More than that, these researchers have highlighted that permafrost possesses a unique ability to trouble dominant theoretical categories within social theory. As Charlotte Wrigley eloquently states, “permafrost breaks free of human categorizations” (2023) of life and nonlife, solidity and fluidity, stability and dynamism, offering a model case for theorizing environmental devastation beyond conventional dualisms. But even among those emerging attempts to build an ‘earthbound’ social theory, theoretical attention to permafrost is still scarce, and its unique lessons for social theory remain unaddressed.

Building on these insights, this conference explores the implications of thinking about, with, and through frozen earth. If we ‘come back’ to frozen earth, what novel understandings of the world might emerge? And what would a permafrost-bound social theory look like? In addressing these and other questions, contributors from different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history, geography, political science, cultural and media studies) and backgrounds (arts and activism) will explore practices and imaginaries related to frozen earth in various historical and geographical contexts. 

Program

Day 1: June 17 - 08:00 – 19:15 (Room Goguel, 56 rue des Saints-Pères)

• 08:00 – 09:00 | Registration
• 09:00 – 09:15 | Introductions
• 09:15 – 10:30 | Keynote Lecture by Cristián Simonetti (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile): “Cryolife in/after the Anthropocene”
• 10:30 – 11:00 | Break & Refreshments
• 11:00 – 12:30 | Panel 1: Shifting Stories of Frozen Earth: Permafrost in a Planetary Age
  • Liv Gwilliam (University of Oxford): “A new ‘weird’ thaw: thinking through Alaska’s ‘rusting’ rivers in the Anthropocene”
  • Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University): “Frozen Soil at the End of the Earth-and Beyond”
  • J. Emil Sennewald (Institut Arts Visuels EDHEA): ”Im Schmelz": landscape as a medium of art practice on the Furka Pass” (with a visual essay by Nicolas Vermot Petit Outhenin)
• 12:30 – 13:30 | Lunch
• 13:30 – 15:30 | Panel 2: Governing Frozen Earth: Permafrost and the Politics of Uncertainty
  • Vincent Hansmann (Humboldt University Berlin): “A Land between solid and fluid: situating permafrost within more-than-human geopolitics”
  • Alessandra Cappelletti (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University): “The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and its thawing permafrost: how local epistemologies and indigenous practices are incorporated into NGO and government engagement”
  • Alexandra Meyer (University of Vienna): “The (in)visibility of permafrost thaw” 
  • Kseniia Bolshakova (Independent researcher): “Social and Environmental Consequences of Permafrost Thaw for the Dolgans of the Taimyr Peninsula”
• 15:30 – 16:00 | Break & Refreshments
• 16:00 – 18:00 | Panel 3: Living with Frozen Earth: Permafrost and the (Extra)Ordinary (temporary move to room 402, 56 rue des Saint-Pères) 
  • Katherine Brewer Ball (Wesleyan University): “Permafrost as metaphor and material on the North Slope of Alaska”
  • Christian A. Rosales (University of the Philippines Los Baños): “Mariyos: ice-earth cosmology among a tropical Indigenous community in the Philippines”
  • Anastasiya Halauniova (Sciences Po): “Making eternity last: time and maintenance of thawing life in Russian Barentsburg”
  • Susanna Gartler (University of Vienna): “What does permafrost mean to you?” Inuvialuit and Gwich’in First Nation land users and knowledge holders’ perceptions of a thawing relation” 

• 18:00 – 19:30 | Artistic Intervention: Concert (only for conference participants) 
  Kerstin Ergenzinger (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), Bnaya Halperin-Kadderi (Sono-Choreographic Collective) and Julia Boike (Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz): “Sensing Frozen Earth: Sonic and Embodied Approaches to Permafrost Data in "Instrumentalities for Common Grounds"

Day 2: June 18 - 09:00 – 19:30 (Room Goguel, 56 rue des Saints-Pères)

• 09:00 – 10:30 | Panel 4: Sensing Frozen Earth: Permafrost Beyond Vision
  • Lilian Kroth (University of Fribourg): “Making sense of ice from space: drawing as a research method to investigate remote sensing of icy environments” (online)
  • Kim Kullman (The Open University): “Attuning to melting places: a pedagogical experiment”
  • Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith (Visual artist): “A feeling of longing that freezes and thaws”
• 10:30 – 11:00 | Break & Refreshments
• 11:00 - 13:00 | Panel 5: Engineering Frozen Earth: Permafrost in Technopolitics
  • Franziska von Verschuer (Goethe-University Frankfurt): “Promises and vulnerabilities of permafrost techno-ecologies: the case of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault”
  • Ksenia Litvinenko (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space): “Mediating permafrost: landscape zoning maps, building norms, and foundations of Soviet extractivism in Siberia and the Far East”
  • Alina Bykova (Stanford University): “Planning the weather war: meteorology, permafrost, and World War II operations on Svalbard” 
  • Javiera Barandiarán* (University of California Santa Barbara), Paola Araya, Cristián Simonetti, José Ragas, Caleb Yunis, Sofía Roldán: “Is Glacier Science Undone, or Just Enough for a Just Transition? Reflections from Andean mines” 
• 13:00 – 14:00| Lunch 
• 14:00 - 16:00| Panel 6: Making Frozen Earth Speak: Permafrost and Knowledge Production
  • Sanne Bech Holmgaard (University of Oslo​​): “Leaking pasts and future proxies: permafrost research landscapes in the High North”
  • Svenja Holste (Bielefeld University): “Research on a vanishing object: the role of emotions in permafrost research and glaciology”
  • Paul Overduin (Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz): “Non-resident descriptions of permafrost” 
  • Sabine Dullin (Sciences Po): “The larch tree and the permafrost: historicizing a unique relationship”
• 16:00– 16:15: Break and refreshments
• 16:15 - 17:15: Keynote lecture Charlotte Alexandra Wrigley (University of Stavanger): We are all permafrost: building radical discontinuity (Amphithéâtre Simone Veil, 28 rue des Saints-Pères)
• 17:15 - 17:30: Break and refreshments
• 17:30 - 19:30: Panel 7: Reimagining Frozen Earth: Thawing Ecologies and Methodological Experimentations
  • Spencer Adams (Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich): “The ice sheet's non-charismatic other: theorizing a metaphorics of frozen earth in Antarctica” 
  • Laure Winants (Visual artist): “Time capsule” 
  • Carina Ren and Astrid O. Andersen (Aalborg University): “Not knowing permafrost in Sisimiut, West Greenland”
  • Kamilla Sibatova (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): “Temporal landscapes: the frozen archive of time and speculative fiction” 

The conference is accompanied by an exhibition at 27 rue Saint Guillaume and at the Room Goguel (56 rue des Saints-Pères) featuring works by Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith, Natalya Saprunova, Rúna Magnússon, and Laure Winants.

Organizing committee

• Anastasiya Halauniova (Sciences Po – Centre de sociologie des organisations)
• Daniella McCahey (Université Texas Tech)
• Alina Bykova (Université de Stanford)
• Susanna Gartler (Université de Vienne)

Organization

Anastasiya Halauniova is an urban sociologist and a post-doctoral researcher of the program “Bruno Latour Fund” at Sciences Po (Centre for the Sociology of Organisations and Institute for environmental transformations).

Partner

• Transatlantic Research Partnership is a program of Albertine Foundation and the French Embassy.
• The event is organized with the support of the Interdisciplinary workshop on environmental research (AIRE), Institute for Environmental Transformations of Sciences Po.