Living with “Slow Upheavals”: Unsettling a Resilience-Based Approach in Ittoqqortoormiit (Kalaallit Nunaat)

This presentation aims to examine how the narratives of changes articulate concerns pertaining to latent threats associated with the material and immaterial dimensions of individual and collective existences. Throughout decolonial approaches and critical ethnography practices in Ittoqqortoormiit (East Kalaallit Nunaat), we ground empirically the possibility to unsettle resilience frameworks by expanding the body of research on slow violence, e.g., unsensational violence that exacerbates the vulnerabilities of ecosystems, non-human and disempowered individuals and groups, in the context of transdisciplinary and community-based climate change research. Our research participants provided insightful characterizations of changes as a category of slow upheavals, defined as events that are not sudden or whose impacts manifest gradually, and whose severity and salience are subject to deliberation. The local experience, which is not described as a fast-changing, also resonates with the contestation of modern ontologies of a stable and mastered world through expression of alternatives onto-epistemologies of living or becoming-with moving worlds. Through a dialogue with colonial and neoliberal critiques of resilience, we also demonstrate the centrality of place-attachment in supporting agency and hope in facing experiences of marginalization. Finally, we point out the need to move toward an agency-based resilience frameworks that take account of lived experience and contribute to pluralize the discourse on the climate and ecological crisis, which is intertwined with the multidimensional upheavals experienced by diverse communities in the Arctic and beyond.