Ice Stages and Staging Ice

Over the last decade, there has been an upsurge in arts and humanities scholarship pertaining to ice, frost, frozen ground and snow. In part, this reflects a determination to shift public and academic attention away from the dominant epistemologies and practices associated with the natural and life sciences. The cryosphere, as indigenous writers have long noted, is also integral to Arctic, cold and mountainous communities’ homelands and knowledges. In this chapter, an encounter with ice is ‘staged’ for the purpose of exploring and interrogating the way ice and snow have been entangled in power relations, nationalisms, heroism and heritage, settler colonialism, militarism, as well as stages for aesthetic debates, environmental activism and cultural imaginaries and Indigenous experiences. A humanities approach to ice invites fresh ways of thinking and living in a world that is being broken down by fossil-fuel capitalism and runaway climate change.