"Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation"--.

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface — From Northern Lights to Fluorescent Lights
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction — Arctic Late Industrialism: Extracting Value through Abstraction
• Chapter 1 — To Melt Away: Abstractive Sensations in Ice
• Chapter 2 — The Biggest, the Best, the Most, the Last: Creating Valuable and Vulnerable Resources in Coastal Alaska
• Chapter 3 — Timescaping the Arctic with Real-Time Data: Challenges for Fishing and Oil Interests
• Chapter 4 — Wild Lands, Remote Edges: Formations and Abstractions in Greenland’s Resource Zones
• Chapter 5 — Forging Off-World Frontiers: Chinese Steel and Arctic Iron
• Chapter 6 — Constructing and Contesting Temporalities in the Mackenzie Gas Project
• Chapter 7 — Material Unconscious of the Earth: Extractive Ontology and the Invisible War in Siberia
• Chapter 8 — Representation without Resemblance: Graphical Expression in Hydrocarbon Industry
• Afterword — Arctic Abstractions
• Index