Department of Geography
at the University of Wisconsin – Madison

Jen Rose Smith

Title: Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies

Education

University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Native American Studies, UC Davis

Ph.D., Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Research Areas

I am a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied knowledges. I serve on an all-Native women advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings, and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska. I am also an Editor as part of the Editorial Collective at the journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. Please contact me if you have questions regarding ACME submissions.

Current Research

My book manuscript, Icy Matters: Race, Indigeneity, and Coloniality in Ice-Geographies, undertakes an analysis of coloniality and racialization in icy locales to demonstrate how ice has been a foundational object for making sense of the world and beyond. Specifically, I analyze ice in three formations: ice as a material entity and terrain of conflict; ice as a cultural and scientific imaginary; and ice as an analytic that produces a temporalized, universal logic of human historicity and futurity. By centering ice, the book investigates the milieu and non-human relations as sites and sources of analysis that are integrally bound up with colonial and racial formations.

Courses Taught

Subjugated Ecological Knowledges (Undergraduate Upper Division AIS, Fall 2020)

Introduction to American Indian Studies (Spring 2020)

Race & Indigeneity in the Apocalypse (Geography Graduate Seminar, Spring 2020)

Recent Publications

Smith, Jen Rose. "“Exceeding Beringia”: Upending Universal Human Events and Wayward Transits in Arctic Spaces." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2020). 
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820950745

Contact Information

Website: http://www.jen-rose-smith.com

Email: jrsmith39@wisc.edu