Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic
by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds
October 21, 2025
Publisher: Yale University Press

About the book: 
Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic
by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds
Yale University Press - 352 pages 39.00 (Hardcover)
Publication Date: October 21, 2025

About the Author: Mia Bennett

As a political geographer with geospatial skills, Dr. Mia Bennett researches the geopolitics of infrastructure development in two areas commonly thought of as frontiers: the Arctic and orbital space. She traces, maps, and critiques the politics, practices, and cultures of frontier-making from above earth to the depths of Indigenous lands. She does so with respect to three global transformations: Indigenous empowerment, the rise of Asia, and the dawn of satellite observations. To understand discursive and material processes of frontier-making at a range of scales, she employs experimental methods including ethnographic fieldwork, critical remote sensing, visual and discourse analysis, archival research, and geovisualization.
 
While climate change is often depicted as the most important force reshaping the Arctic, her examinations recenter human actors within northern social and ecological transformations. A common thread throughout her scholarship is a critique of frontier development across terrestrial borders, planetary orbits, and geologic strata, which brings into relief the effects - and limits - of political agency.

She shares her work across public and scholarly outlets, including her blog, Cryopolitics, which she has run since 2009, and journals including World Development, Political Geography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Remote Sensing of Environment. Her work has been supported by generous grants from the Fulbright Arctic Initiative, Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Regional Studies Association, National Science Foundation, UW Global Innovation Fund, and International Council for Canadian Studies, among others. Her efforts to make Arctic research accessible and meaningful to wider audiences has been recognized by the Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award from the AAG’s Political Geography Specialty Group.
 
Bennett previously taught in the Department of Geography and School of Modern Languages & Cultures (China Studies Programme) at the University of Hong Kong.
Biography Credit:  University of Washington

About the Author: Klaus Dodds

Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994, and thereafter took up a position at the University of Edinburgh and thereafter joined Royal Holloway. He has held a Visiting Erskine Fellowship at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury (2002) and been a visiting Fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford (2010-11) and St Johns College, University of Oxford (2017-18). In 2005 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography and in 2016 was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2017-2020) for a project concerned with the ‘Global Arctic’.

He has published many books and articles concerned with the geopolitics and governance of the Polar Regions as well as the cultural politics of ice. These include: The Scramble for the Poles (2016), Ice: Nature and Culture and The Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know (2019). He has served as a specialist adviser to two parliamentary select committees; the House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic (2014-5) and the House of Commons Environment Audit Committee’s Arctic enquiry (2018). In 2019. He was appointed the UK representative of the IASC’s Social and Human Working Group. He has visited Antarctica on four separate occasions and travelled extensively in the Arctic region.
Biography Credit:  British Antarctic Survey