Skip navigation

You are in:  Home » Staff and students » Postgraduate students » Christina Adcock

Christina Adcock (née Sawchuk) BA (Hons), MPhil, PhD

SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)

Biography

Christina first became aware of an interest in northern history when she took a senior-level history course entitled "Exploration and Travel in the Canadian Arctic" in the second year of her undergraduate degree. The next two summers she obtained grants from the Faculty of Arts and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute, both at the University of Alberta, to conduct independent research on the subject. The result was an annotated bibliography of twentieth-century travel narratives written about the Canadian North, which she is currently revising for publication. This project gave her an excellent grounding in northern literature and history, and spurred her to pursue a specifically northern-oriented research course at the postgraduate level.

Career

Qualifications

Research

Postdoctoral research

My postdoctoral project is entitled "Labours on the (trap)line: The production of northern non-aboriginal trapping identities and communities, 1900-1990." It will investigate the development of non-aboriginal identities and communities through the work of fur trapping in the twentieth-century western Canadian Arctic and Subarctic. Scant scholarly attention has been paid, thus far, to historical non-aboriginal northern societies, and this project will help to rectify such a lacuna. Northern trapping will be studied as a concrete assemblage of theories and practices responsive to changing social and ecological conditions and grounded within larger sociocultural trends and concerns. I will examine various kinds of relationships: those between non-aboriginal trappers, between non-aboriginal trappers and aboriginal trappers, and between trappers and entrapped and entrained animals. Markers of occupation, ethnicity, and indigeneity will be considered insofar as they affected the creation of individual trapping identities as well as the interaction between trappers and other residents of northern communities. Finally, this project will analyse the influence that external non-trapping actors—including southern Canadian federal and provincial bureaucrats, the North American fur trade industry, and the popular and journalistic press—had upon the actions and representations of northern trappers and trapping.

Doctoral research

My PhD dissertation, entitled "Tracing warm lines: northern Canadian exploration, knowledge, and memory, 1905-1965," considers the early twentieth-century culture of northern Canadian exploration through a selective examination of the lives and written works of four contemporary explorers: George Douglas (1875-1963), Guy Blanchet (1884-1966), Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), and Richard Finnie (1906-1987). Written from a cultural historical perspective, the dissertation also draws upon recent work in the interdisciplinary study of exploration that understands this activity as an assemblage of cultural practices to do with the production and consumption of travel. Against the current trend of northern Canadian historiography, it asserts the importance of twentieth-century exploration, and of exploration generally, in creating modern identities, in producing and circulating knowledge about the Canadian North, and in creating representations of that region for the private and public consumption of southern Canadians and Americans. Moreover, it argues that closer attention should be paid to the personal relationships between explorers, as well as the bearing of such relations upon the creation, verification, and circulation of knowledge about the North. The first chapter lays out these arguments and outlines the general shape of twentieth-century exploration in northern Canada.

A series of case studies, set predominantly between the years of 1920 and 1965, describe and analyze exploratory encounters within the individuals under consideration—the interaction of their experiences, memories, and beliefs—and without: that is, between these individuals and other northern and southern peoples, environments, and cultures. The second and third chapters analyze the relations between northern exploratory identities and practices, the representation of the North, and cultural trends in interwar Canada and the United States, namely antimodernism and the debunking of myths. The fourth and fifth chapters are detailed accounts of two knowledge projects in which these explorers participated: an informal republic of northern letters, and the preparation of an Encyclopedia Arctica in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The sixth chapter considers the individual and communal efforts of these four men to preserve their knowledge and commemorate their achievements as the end of their lives grew near, as well as the significance of their efforts within the changing terrain of northern Canadian scientific exploration at mid-century.

Publications

Selected conference papers

Teaching

External activities