Thermal Colonization: Energy Storage Architectures in Nunavut
RAFICO RUIZ: CUSP LECTURE AT WELFARE IN DANGER? SYMPOSIUM
The lecture is part of the upcoming symposium Welfare in Danger? Infrastructures, Institutions, and Environments in an Age of Risk, at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. Organized by Jennifer Mack, Elisa López Koch, and Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, the symposium focuses on how histories of welfare provision (in social programs, services, housing, energy, public space, and more) connect to today's concerns about climate change, rising nativism, and demographic transformations that challenge the content and meaning of “welfare.” See below for further information about the lecture.
Tid: To 2026-09-24 kl 14.15
Plats: The Thunberg Lecture Hall, Uppsala
Videolänk: Zoom Webinar
Medverkande: Rafico Ruiz
We are very happy to announce the public CUSP lecture, Thermal Colonization: Energy Storage Architectures in Nunavut, by scholar, educator, and curator Rafico Ruiz.
Abstract
In this CUSP lecture, Rafico Ruiz will discuss questions related to the CCA Collection, with particular attention to the recently processed Papineau Gérin Lajoie Edwards fonds.
The pressures of managing harsh climate conditions often create opportunities for settler colonial interference. In the Canadian territory of Nunavut, part of Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homelands), these incursions have advanced the frontiers of settler occupation in ways that have reframed cold environments as uninhabitable regions in need of aid and remediation. In these settler narratives, temperature becomes standardized, uneasily overcome by practices of architecture and infrastructure building that maintain a temperate norm and a steady temperature range.
In this lecture, Rafico Ruiz examines the ‘storage architectures’ that have facilitated this temperate normalization that is fundamental to the ongoing process of thermal colonization. He will focus on the moment of consolidation around diesel fuel in Nunavut throughout the 1970s; a decisive precondition of disconnection from the national energy grid. Storage architectures hold these dialectical constraints: energy necessity and atmospheric harm; and marks of settler foundations and contemporary Inuit lives and livelihoods.
Bio
Rafico Ruiz is a scholar, educator, and curator who joined the CCA in 2019 as Associate Director of Research. Ruiz’s work explores settler colonialism and infrastructure in the circumpolar world, as well as contemporary environmental issues related to the phase states of ice. In addition to leading a number of research fellowship programs at the CCA, Ruiz co-curated ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home (2022), the CCA’s first Indigenous-led exhibition and publication project that sought to centre a land-based architecture by and for Inuit and Sámi communities. Ruiz is also the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (Duke University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke University Press, 2021).
Please join us on Thursday to welcome Rafico Ruiz!
All the best,
Jennifer Mack, Elisa López Koch, and Alejandra Navarrete Llopis