Description
This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the planetary politics of freezing and thawing, materially and metaphorically. Materially, freezing and thawing has a central place in the environmental and political consequences of climate change – from the receding of glaciers; to the rise in sea levels; to the thawing of the tundra; to unprecedented access to shipping lanes and underwater resources (Dodds and Nuttall 2016; Rowe 2020; Wrigley 2023). In addition, our mastery over the ice through the development of refrigeration transformed global capitalists circuits and made ice a commodity to be bought and enjoyed (Hobart 2022). Metaphorically, freezing and thawing has also served as a framing device for our thinking about global politics – from the Cold War; to freezing and thawing diplomatic relations; to cold, hard facts; to cryogenic seedbanks that seek to freeze time and nature (Harrington 2022; Yao 2022). In addition, quests to conquer frozen places as the ultimate frontier often reinforces global hierarchies and racial difference (Wedderburn 2023; Yao 2024). This roundtable puts these differing analytical strands in conversation to explore the co-constitutive relationship between the materiality and imaginaries of freezing and thawing, and how these understandings shape planetary politics in the Anthropocene.
