The aims of this introductory workshop are twofold: First, we have invited scholars with various degrees of expertise and experience working at the intersection of 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. The premise of this proposition 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 UiC, 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; at Rice, with its interdisciplinary focus on climate change and media/artistic praxis.

Creating a durable research network across these three institutions and network of additional partners stands to advance 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 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 UC Berkeley (Peder Sather Center), NTNU, and Rice University, we hope this first meeting will lay the groundwork for a loose but robust collaborative network through which we can shape a shared research program into an emerging field. This workshop, mirrored by a Trondheim-based event in Spring/Summer 2019, functions as a kind of pilot project for how such a program might become concretized in specific thematic agendas, methodologies, and public outcomes.