Professor: Casey Shoop
credits 4.00
- CRN 22689: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:20pm @ CHA 202
Glacial ice is at once a record of temporality at different scales and a central character in the human records (both written and oral) we keep about the passage of time. In this regard, glacial ice is both a medium of storage and the material of storytelling. The ambition of this course is to think about glacial ice in this double sense as an elemental archive of time and as a complex figure at the center of multiple human archives. How does ice keep time, and how do we in turn preserve ice in the stories we inherit and imagine about the environment?
The meaning of “archive” comes from the Greek arkheion for a house or domicile. What does glacial ice house and for whom (and what) does it constitute a home? Conversely, who or what do human archives admit into the historical record, and whom or what do they refuse admission or erase altogether? Such questions will require us to think about both kinds of archives as matters of environmental justice. Far from being an inert substance, the ice archive poses complex questions about the politics of representation: How is this history measured and recorded, and for whom does this story speak? Who is the keeper of the ice archive and who is granted admission into the process of its collection, recording, and reading?
In our course, we’ll think about ice cores as archives of scientific and climatological knowledge, but also about how ice figures in archives of storytelling, historical documentation, and visual arts. Ice is a primary character at the center of stories and images of life in the indigenous oral storytelling traditions of the Inupiat and Tlingit peoples of the Northwest and the Arctic. We will also focus on contemporary artistic and social responses to Arctic warming and the meaning of ice in regional and global contexts. What kinds of ice do we find in these archives and how do they speak back in complementary and critical ways to those material records in the ice? Such differences in cultural expression and media are crucial not only to the constitution of the ice archive, but how ideas get expressed and refracted through it. Students will end the term by working with an archive they’ve chosen to explore these human and material interactions in independent research projects.
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill an Arts and Letters Colloquium and the HC 444H: US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement. If a student already has completed an Arts and Letters Colloquium, this course will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and the US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.