Contributors
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Gail Baikie is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work in Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is an Indigenous scholar of Inuit-settler heritage. Her ancestors originate from the self-governing territory of Nunatsiavut (Labrador, Canada). Prior to an academic career beginning in 2002, Gail had fifteen years of professional practice experience mainly in the field of the social, cultural, and political well-being of Indigenous communities in Atlantic Canada. Her scholarship is focused on Indigenous and decolonizing theories and methods in research, pedagogy, and professional practices. She has researched the impact of natural resource development on northern, including Indigenous, peoples. Currently, Gail is involved in several projects focused on the perinatal well-being of Inuit mothers and babies in Nunavut, Canada. She is especially interested in the education and professional development of Indigenous students and has taught in a number of Indigenous social work programs. Gail is currently co-coordinating the development of a Mi’kmaq-centered Master of Social Work program.
Mia M. Bennett is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, she researches cultures and practices of frontier-making in the Arctic and orbital space. Bennett's methods combine fieldwork and critical remote sensing, a subfield whose development she is helping to lead. Since 2009, she has run a blog on the Arctic, Cryopolitics. Bennett received a PhD in Geography from UCLA and an MPhil in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar.
Hester Blum is Professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Duke 2019) and The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (UNC 2008), and the editor of the Oxford edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (2022), among other volumes. She has participated in several research trips to the Arctic and Antarctica, and her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Blum’s current book project is titled Polar Erratics: In and Out of Place in the Arctic and Antarctica.
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Zachary Cudney (he/him) is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington in Seattle, and serves as a representative for the Polar Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. Zach is a cultural geographer whose work contributes to polar studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. His research examines and critiques practices of preserving, remembering, and narrating icy landscapes in the context of Anthropogenic climate change, and recent topics include glacier funerals and Arctic archives. Zach is originally from the lake effect snow belt of Western New York and earned an MA in Geography at SUNY University at Albany.
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Matt Dyce is a Professor of Geography at The University of Winnipeg. His research interests are in social studies of science, cultural and historical geography, and environmental history.
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Bruce Erickson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba. His work investigates the cultural politics of recreation and tourism within the context of settler colonialism in Canada and beyond. He is the author of Canoe Nation: Nature, Race and the Making of a National Icon and the co-editor of The Politics of the Canoe, and Queer Ecologies.
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Isabelle Gapp is an art historian who writes and teaches at the intersections of landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. She is an Interdisciplinary Fellow (Lecturer/Assistant Prof.) in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. In addition to leading From the Floe Edge (2024-ongoing), Isabelle is the project co-lead for Teaching Arctic Environments, and an editor for the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE). She is the author of A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930 (2024).
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Patricia (Patti) Johnston is an Assistant Professor at University of Calgary’s Faculty of Social Work. She is Qallunaat (non-Inuit)/non-Indigenous scholar that has worked with Inuit youth, women, and families in Arctic Canada for almost two decades. Having lived in the Arctic and worked within health social services organizations, she holds an awareness for the range of challenges and structural issues facing remote communities, as well as the processes, policies, and practices that serve to reinforce them. As a community-based researcher, Dr. Johnston’s work emphasizes self-determination, self-governance, child and family wellness, and perinatal social-health supports and services. Her work is informed by an intimate understanding of the social, economic and health inequities experienced by Inuit and northern Arctic Indigenous peoples.
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Jonathan Peyton is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Academics in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba. He was the Fulbright Canada Chair in Arctic Studies at the University of Washington (2022-23). His research focuses primarily on the social, ecological and economic effects of megaprojects in the Canadian North - hydroelectric projects, extractive economies and large scale infrastructure developments. He is the author of Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development on Northwest British Columbia (UBC Press, 2017). Current projects aim to analyse the early stages of Arctic oil and gas regimes, the emergence of Prairie resource cultures in times of transition, and the political ecology of urban natures in Winnipeg.
Chase Puentes (she/her) is a doctoral student of Geography at the University of Washington studying the intersections of subsistence food systems, climate change, gender, and Indigenous self-determination in Kivalina, Alaska. She leverages an interdisciplinary, place-based approach to uplift community partner priorities, from emergency medical training to digital storytelling projects. Her dissertation, entitled The Nikipiaq Collective, aims to illuminate the contributions of Kivalina women to community wellbeing and the ongoing dissemination of cultural knowledge, culminating in the co-creation of an Iñupiaq foods cookbook. Chase's work has been featured in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, The Nature Conservancy, the Arctic an International Relations Series, and the Program on Climate Change. She is a Graduate Student Equity & Excellence scholar and member of the Engaged Ethnography Lab.
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Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu/Eyak) is an assistant professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington in Coast Salish territories. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. She is the author of Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity from Duke University Press. She serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska.
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James Wilt is a PhD candidate at the University of Manitoba, researching the environmental history of experimental oil spills in Canada.