About the Author: Jen Rose Smith is a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied knowledges. She is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, and received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies, her Master's Degree from the same department, and holds a BA in English Literature and the Environment from the University of Alaska, Southeast. She has published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and The Geographical Journal. Her first book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic was released by Duke University Press in May 2025.

About the Book: Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?

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