Managing Melt: Ice, Refrigeration, and Hawaiian Body Politics

Managing Melt: Ice, Refrigeration, and Hawaiian Body Politics
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, UT Austin – Anthropology

Monday, Feb 21: Open Talks 12-1pm, Grad Workshops 1-3pm
Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/95385019774?pwd=N0I1THZGYlQwZi9UT2Q5dFlXSEttdz09

Abstract:
Nearly everything Hawaiʻi residents eat is imported, despite its history of agricultural abundance, and real estate development has encroached on arable farmlands such that a mere 11.6% of food is locally grown. Not only is Hawaiʻi dependent upon imported food, but the added energy costs built-in for maintaining perishables makes its groceries the most expensive in the United States. In this way, cold chain logics offer one way to trace the role that temperature plays in organizing bodies in within the tropics. Examining how freezing and refrigeration technologies function as a critical node of Hawaiʻi’s food system as a structure of settler colonialism, this talk considers what the promises and limits of thermal management might be for decolonial struggles over land and sovereignty. In doing so, Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart asks: how does ‘artificial’ ice and refrigeration constrain the conditions of possibility within movements that call for de-occupation, demilitarization, and the dismantling of the settler state? In what ways does it support activist and movement spaces? And, lastly, what place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that aim to move beyond capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism, when coldness has played such an infrastructural role in these political systems of oppression?

This is a part of the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) Winter 2022 Series - "Water Ways: New Social Science, Science Studies, and Environmental Approaches to Water"

This is also a part of the class Anthrcul 558 section 002