Talk "Immediacies and Estrangements amid Shifting Ecologies of Ice – Openings" by Mirjami Lantto (University of Glasgow)

SEMINAR TITLE

Immediacies and Estrangements amid Shifting Ecologies of Ice – Openings

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

Ice is a key sentinel of Anthropogenic change in the 21st century. Its shifting dynamics and ecologies are felt across multiple planetary registers, entangled with cultural and personal meaning. In Northern Finland, the increasingly frequent switching between warm and cold periods creates unpredictable and unprecedented ice dynamics and ecologies across landscapes; communities face new threats on increasingly precarious sea and river ice, while simultaneously the foraging ecologies of animals are interrupted with hard ice layers forming on the forest floor.

This seminar seeks to initiate discussion around questions regarding the varied, more-than-human effects of the shifting dynamics and ecologies of ice across biogeographical regions and landscapes in the North. To begin, I will give a brief introduction to my doctoral research, which concerned itself with the emergence of particular riverine knowledges and archives, while also initiating questions about changing dynamics and ecologies of ice, and the complex relationalities, immediacies, and estrangements they enact. I will then outline the broad themes of my 5-month placement with the Biodiverse Anthropocenes programme at the University of Oulu, which seeks to develop further lines of inquiry on such questions about ice. The remainder of the seminar will focus on sharing thoughts about human and non-human positionalities amid changing dynamics and ecologies of ice across Northern landscapes. Via some key questions, I invite participants to brainstorm lines of inquiry on the social and more-than-human effects of the changing cryosphere, including concerns about grief and trauma, adaptation, and interpretation of environmental signals of change.

BIO

Mirjami Lantto is a PhD researcher in the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. Her research combines feminist materialism and critical physical geography to investigate the emergence of particular riverine knowledges and archives, through a series of environmental sensing technologies that are animated by light (such as drones and experimental photography techniques). She has joined the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research programme as a visitor through a Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) funded Saltire Emerging Researcher Scheme, that seeks to foster connections between Scottish and European researchers.