Welcome

This site will serve as a simple repository for NADO workshop information and documents, and may be updated with additional details as the workshop approaches. The site includes the workshop schedule, list of participants, and locations. You may navigate to those pages using the links in the navbar at the top-right of this page (laptop/desktop only) or using the top-left sidebar (mobile/tablet only). This site mirrors the site made for a smaller, exploratory workshop held in November 2018 at UC Berkeley; for more information on participants and agenda from our first workshop, see the original site.

Research Program & Project Aims

The New Arctic & Digital Ocean project was inaugurated in 2018 with support from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study at UC Berkeley. Our first workshop, held in November 2018 at UC Berkeley, brought together scholars from UC Berkeley, NTNU, University of Tromsø, University of Alberta, and Rice University. Workshop participants brought various degrees of expertise and experience working at the intersection of the physical sciences, science and technology studies, anthropology, geography, and the energy humanities to explore the coproduction of a “New Arctic” and a “digital ocean” across U.S. and Norwegian contexts. Our second workshop, scheduled for June 2019 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, advances this research program while incorporating a new group of scholars, practicioners, artists, and activists based primarily in Norway.

The core proposition of this ongoing and collaborative research is that the New Arctic is inextricable from the infrastructures, representational techniques, and systems of governance through which it is rendered as a digital ocean. In turn, the emerging New Arctic–digital ocean complex opens up lines of inquiry into the geo-economics of Arctic resources, logistics, and finance; the geopolitics of polar militarism and international law; and geophysical observation, modeling, and simulation. In addition to the insight offered by workshop participants in these fields, these research themes are robustly grounded in the project’s institutional hubs, providing the basis for comparative and conjunctural research: at NTNU and UiT, with strength in Arctic studies and the presence of extractive and energy industries in Norway; at Berkeley, with its strength in critical geography and its proximity to technology firms and NGOs in the Bay Area that are building digital ocean platforms.

Creating a durable research network across these three institutions and network of additional partners stands to advance multi-disciplinary and area scholarship, enhance graduate training, and promote international scientific exchange. Our second goal, therefore, is to bring together a small group of social science and humanities scholars whose intersecting work on the Arctic, oceanic studies, energy, infrastructure, and climate offer a unique and collective intellectual formation for ongoing research into the "New Arctic". With seed funds from the Peder Sather Center at UC Berkeley and NTNU for our first year program, we aim to lay the groundwork for a loose but robust collaborative network through which we can shape a shared research program into an emerging field. Our Berkeley and Trondheim workshops will serve as a kind of pilot project for how such a program might become concretized in specific thematic agendas, methodologies, and public outcomes.