Rafico Ruiz – författare

As the climate warms and the hydrological cycle falters, ice is no longer a reliable feature of higher latitudes or winter seasons. What are the consequences of the planet's waning capacity to cool? In other words, what comes after ice?This collection examines the implications of the end of consistent freezing and thawing cycles. After Ice gathers experts in a wide range of disciplines to articulate aspects of the cold humanities. They investigate ice and its dynamic properties as a foundational element of Indigenous communities in the Arctic regions, as a commodity with technological and political value, and as a reflection of environmental change and the passage of time.As the future of the cryosphere is increasingly determined by human behaviour, this thought-provoking exploration envisions ice as both a phase of water and as a milieu for sensemaking. It asks us to consider how to define, describe, and materially characterize our warming world.

As the climate warms and the hydrological cycle falters, ice is no longer a reliable feature of higher latitudes or winter seasons. What are the consequences of the planet's waning capacity to cool? In other words, what comes after ice?This collection examines the implications of the end of consistent freezing and thawing cycles. After Ice gathers experts in a wide range of disciplines to articulate aspects of the cold humanities. They investigate ice and its dynamic properties as a foundational element of Indigenous communities in the Arctic regions, as a commodity with technological and political value, and as a reflection of environmental change and the passage of time.As the future of the cryosphere is increasingly determined by human behaviour, this thought-provoking exploration envisions ice as both a phase of water and as a milieu for sensemaking. It asks us to consider how to define, describe, and materially characterize our warming world.

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation-the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation-from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline-responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation-the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation-from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline-responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other.Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, MÉl Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska