The Great White Beast
Mx. Science is thus a liminal figure that conjures many shapeshifting, associative frames, depending on who encounters them. Such an idea may potentially be put into dialogue with traditional Inuit beliefs and legends of the polar bear, who is traditionally referred to as the "Great White Beast" (Jimmy Qirqut, Gjoa Haven Elder, 2022) and is also a shapeshifting figure. Sometimes human, sometimes bear.
Although some resonance can be found between Mx. Science and Inuit legends of shapeshifting polar bears, I am more interested in how the presence of Mx. Science can affectively and performatively signify an ever shapeshifting "Great White Beast" of settler-colonialism that continues to haunt polar bear management and monitoring and other Arctic-science spaces. Another figure that Mx. Science can be considered to iteratively perform is that of the "wicked problem". Mx. Science as the (Great White) "Beast" of the "polar bear problem", that is seemingly im/possible to "tame" (see Termeer et al. 2019).