Reterritorializing Canada: arctic ice's liquid modernity and the imagining of a Canadian archipelago

Studying mobile actor networks of moving people, objects, images, and
discourses, in conjunction with changing time-spaces, offers a unique opportunity to
understand important, and yet relatively neglected, "relational material" dynamics of
mobility. A key example of this phenomenon is the recontinentalization of Canada amidst
dramatically changing articulations of the meanings and boundaries of the Canadian landice-
ocean mass. A notable reason why Canada is being re-articulated in current times is the
extensiveness of Arctic thawing. The reconfiguration of space and "motility" options in the
Arctic constitutes an example of how "materiality and sociality produce themselves
together." In this paper we examine the possibilities and risks connected to this
recontinentalization of Canada's North. In exploring the past, present, and immediate
future of this setting, we advance the paradigmatic view that Canada's changing Arctic is
the key element in a process of transformation of Canada into a peninsular body
encompassed within a larger archipelagic entity: a place more intimately attuned to its
immense (and growing) coastal and insular routes.