Profs & Pints San Francisco: The Arctic in Transition

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “The Arctic in Transition,” a look at the political, environmental, and technological forces reshaping Earth’s northernmost region, with Mia Bennett, associate professor of geography at the University of Washington-Seattle and co-author of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic.

[Tickets available only online, available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-arctic-transition .]

In the Arctic, reliably frozen sea ice and thirty years of post-Cold War regional cooperation are ceding to the intertwined pressures of climate change and geopolitical competition. Melting ice, raging wildfires, and permafrost thaw are drastically reshaping the environment, while tensions between nations and peoples with a stake in the region’s future are heating up.

Come gain a deep understanding of the change underway at the Arctic and of the various forces reshaping it with Mia Bennett, a scholar of the Arctic who has done years of fieldwork there.

Situating the contemporary Arctic within a longer history of human habitation and migration and ecological change, she will show how the region is an arena of constant political, environmental, and technological transformation. What is happening there portends the future of global politics, resource competition, climate governance, and Earth as a whole.

Dr. Bennett will set the stage by offering background on the Arctic’s 32,000 years of human habitation and its ecological transformations marked by the expansion and retreat of ice cover. She’ll trace how the region evolved from a sparsely connected frozen periphery into a central arena of global strategic interest. You’ll learn how the Arctic has been the site of twenty-first-century political experimentation producing governance mechanisms that incorporate Indigenous Peoples