Encountering the Great White Beast: Polar Bear Research as Ethical Space, Practice and Process of Engagement
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Authors
de Wildt, Saskia Yvette
Date
2025-09-26
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Polar Bears , (Auto-)Ethnography , Wayfaring , Ethical Space of Engagement , Agential Realism , Creative Practice , Participatory Film Making , Aesthetic Action , Performance , Nunavut , Knowledge Reconciliation , Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit , Wildlife Monitoring , Genomic Science , Science Philosophy , Onto-Epistemology
Alternative Title
Abstract
My dissertation explores the possibilities for ethical knowledge conciliation within community-based polar bear monitoring in Nunavut, Canada by putting feminist theorist and physics-philosopher Karen Barad’s agential realism into dialogue with Indigenous scholar Willie Ermine’s Ethical Space of Engagement (ESE). Situated within BearWatch: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge—a Genome Canada-funded project that developed a non-invasive, community-based toolkit to monitor polar bears across Inuit Nunangat, this research asks: What does it mean, within the larger apparatus of community-based polar bear research, to practice knowledge conciliation guided by the principles of the ESE, rather than by data-driven needs?
The dissertation draws from three years of fieldwork conducted with Inuit community members from Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) and Salliq (Coral Harbour) in the Nunavut Settlement Area. Rather than viewing conciliation as a negotiation between epistemologies, it views knowledge production as intra-active processes where cross-cultural and disciplinary differences are materially and discursively enacted. Methodologically, my study employs a creative practice (auto-)ethnography, incorporating aesthetic actions like wayfaring, performance art, filmmaking, and collaging as tools for sensorial and performative engagement in-between more-than-human agencies including, but not limited to Inuit hunters, researchers, polar bears, qamutiit (sleds plural), sea ice, and seasonal changes.
Written performatively, this dissertation unfolds in rounds and is accompanied by an interactive digital cartographic platform allowing readers to thread their own way through the research. Ultimately, this work reimagines ethical engagement as a shared wayfaring, where knowledge and ethics emerge through moving, making, and practicing research together.