Hybrid Event – A Cold Colonialism
Modern Exploration and the Canadian North, with history professor and author Tina Adcock (SFU History)
Thursday – 27 February 2025 – 1-2:30pm PST
AQ 6229 – Department of History, Simon Fraser University and Zoom
Hosted by SFU History
Please join SFU’s Department of History as we relaunch our tradition of Public Lectures in a slightly different format. Professor and author Tina Adcock (SFU History) will sketch out the shape and significance of twentieth-century exploration in Canada’s North, based on her forthcoming book of the same name.
In-person venue seating is limited – please register for a spot on Zoom if in-person tickets are sold out!
About this Public Lecture: Exploration has long been pivotal to southern engagements with northern Canada, but it is most often associated with the nineteenth century or earlier. This talk, based on Adcock’s forthcoming book, sketches out the shape and significance of twentieth-century exploration in this region. This enterprise offered intellectual and emotional solutions to the problem of extending industrial and settler colonialism into the Arctic and Subarctic. It did so by creating what Adcock describes as an illusion of proximity to the North.
Exploration helped individuals normally resident in the South construct specific forms of “northern” knowledge, expertise, authority, and belonging. These then gave southern industries and governments confidence and licence to sideline the voices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous northerners, intervene in northern Indigenous homelands, and plot their development and resettlement. Adcock introduces critical terminology that punctures this illusion of proximity, and that may be useful to scholars of modern colonial settings within and beyond Canada.
Finally, Adcock concludes with some reflections on exploration’s continued appeal in settler colonial Canada, as well as the potential anticolonial and antiracist value of acknowledging a widespread, but hidden subject position in Canada: that of southerner.
About Tina Adcock: Tina Adcock is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, where she researches and teaches Arctic, Canadian, and environmental history. She is co-editor (with Edward Jones-Imhotep) of Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (UBC Press, 2018) and author of A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North (UBC Press, forthcoming 2025). An advocate for and practitioner of digital history, she has commissioned and edited nine thematic series for The Otter~La loutre, the blog of the Network in Canadian History and Environment, as well as one e-book, Landscapes of Science (NiCHE, 2019). She is an editor of H-Environment Roundtable Reviews. Her favourite animal is the muskox.
