Join Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director, Research, for a talk at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study where he 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.

This event is organised by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and is free and open to the public as a part of the Critically Urgent Societal Problems series.