The Wreck-site: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 12:44, 18 July 2025

The Wrecksite as a figuration to think with emerges from the existing wrecks of HMS Terror and Erebus, in the vicinity of Gjoa Haven: material traces of long-standing Inuit-Qablunaat (non-Inuit) encounters.

These sites are not static ruins but spaces where history, knowledge, and materiality continue to create meaning and matter.

Research as a wreck-site is not just about what is uncovered, but how research itself becomes a contested space, claimed, studied, and sometimes fought over. Shaped by seasonal forces as shifting ice and weather limit access, altering what can be seen, gathered, or known, it also becomes a foundations for new growth.

My research is both a site of "becoming reef," opening new relational possibilities, as it is part of becoming research "heritage"- shaped by layered histories and ongoing transformation.

Return to: "Another Point of Beginning"

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-Althought the wrecksite can be seen as a familiar trope in the post-humanities and "blue" literature, it is in this case not a metaphorical figure. Around Gjoa Haven, two such sites, harbouring the shipwrecks of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus exist in proximity to the community. These sites speak to longstanding (knowledge) encounters between Qablunaat (non-Inuit people) and Inuit across time and space. Whether such encounters materialize through site-specific instances, by for example the repurposing of wood from these shipwrecks to create traditional objects, or through more generally encompassing structures like the Inuit Land Claim Agreements, the wrecksite refers, for me, to the materiality of cross-cultural encounter across time and space.
+The Wrecksite as a figuration to think with emerges from the existing wrecks of HMS Terror and Erebus, in the vicinity of Gjoa Haven: material traces of long-standing Inuit-Qablunaat (non-Inuit) encounters.
-The wrecksite to me also slowly started to emerge as a complex body in which the apparatuses of (inter)national science-based polar bear conservation, Inuit self-determination, polar bear co-management and monitoring, but also the Bearwatch project, my knowledge-land-scape and your decisions are entangled. The shipwreck is a figure that gestures towards the dynamic interplay of all such material agencies.
+These sites are not static ruins but spaces where history, knowledge, and materiality continue to create meaning and matter.
-Considering the BearWatch project as multiple sites of both cultural and natural multiplicity and opportunity, allows for understanding that ethical engagement might not need to be all or nothing endeavor, but rather a vista that opens previously closed processes to the possibilities of doing things differently - even if only "here and there". Like shipwrecks, projects might be sites of ‘becoming reef’, as well as they are sites of ‘becoming heritage’.
+Research as a wreck-site is not just about what is uncovered, but how research itself becomes a contested space, claimed, studied, and sometimes fought over. Shaped by seasonal forces as shifting ice and weather limit access, altering what can be seen, gathered, or known, it also becomes a foundations for new growth.
-<div class="next_choice">See how, a process of wayfaring reconceptualizes the idea of "final workshops" from projects coming to an end, towards being stories-so-far that are always also another point of beginning. </div>
+My research is both a site of "becoming reef," opening new relational possibilities, as it is part of becoming research "heritage"- shaped by layered histories and ongoing transformation.
-<span class="return to cut 3 link" data-page-title="Fall 2022 Gjoa Haven" data-section-id="3" data-encounter-type="return">[[Fall 2022 Gjoa Haven#Another Point of Beginning|Turn to "Another Point of Beginning"]]</span>
+<span class="return to cut 3 link" data-page-title="Fall 2022 Gjoa Haven" data-section-id="3" data-encounter-type="return">[[Fall 2022 Gjoa Haven#Another Point of Beginning|Return to: "Another Point of Beginning"]]</span>