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Rafico Ruiz

Dr. Rafico Ruiz

Carson Fellow

Rafico Ruiz is director of research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. He pursues research on settler infrastructure building and design in the circumpolar world, with adjacent interests in post-global warming ice as a material form of political economic and cultural communication. Ruiz holds an interdisciplinary PhD in communication studies and the history and theory of architecture from McGill University. He was recently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation and the Promise of Extraction and the co-editor with Melody Jue of Saturation: An Elemental Politics. Ruiz was the 2018 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arctic studies at Dartmouth College. His work appears in the International Journal of Communication, Communication +1, and Continuum, amongst others. He is also the co-editor of the open access journal Culture Machine.

RCC Research Project: Phase State Earth: Ice at the Ends of Climate Change


Selected Publications:

  • Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation and the Promise of Extraction. (forthcoming: Duke University Press).
  • Edited with Melody Jue. Saturation: An Elemental Politics. (forthcoming: Duke University Press).
  • “Icebergs in Iowa: Hydrological Media and the Production of Cold War Scientific Knowledge.” Cold Science: Environmental Knowledge in the North American Arctic during the Cold War, edited by Stephen Bocking and Daniel Heidt. London and New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • “Media Environments: Icebergs/Screens/History,” in Journal of Northern Studies 9, no. 1 (2015): 33–50 (special section: Northern Environmental History).
  • “Iceberg Economies,” in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 32 (Fall 2014): 34–58 (special issue: Theory in a Cold Climate).
  • “Arctic Infrastructures: Tele Field Notes,” in Communication +1 3 (2014): 1–25 (special issue: Afterlives of Systems).