Ruins in the Field: Materiality, Spectres and Pluritemporal Encounters of the Oxford University Arctic Expedition

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how encounters with ruins and spectres in the field inform (post)colonial trajectories of exploration and research. It does so by illustrating how the material indeterminacy and haunted materialities of ruins play into the relationship between self, landscape and history that explorers (and researchers) construct during fieldwork. Empirically, the paper traces the 1924 Oxford University Arctic Expedition to Svalbard—a significant event in the evolution of elite undergraduate exploration which continues to haunt the present. Through play with categories of absence and presence, the Oxford Expedition mobilised spectral and material traces of past lives in the field, such as crumbling huts and animal remains, to position themselves within the patrilineal structures of exploration. The paper contributes to conceptual debates on ruins by generating novel insights into how their materiality and spectral qualities render them functional as cultural‐political resources in historic fieldwork. These same qualities imbue even ‘modest’ ruins in the field with the potential to serve as nodal points in wider (post)colonial power‐geometries. In conclusion, the paper contemplates the methodological purchase of thinking with the haunted materialities of ruins, addressing the tension between critiquing the colonising effects of historical fieldwork while still relying on field encounters to produce geographical knowledge. It is argued that ruin encounters offer poignant moments allowing geographers to confront the spectral politics of the field. Leaning into such tension should be part of the ongoing questioning of our scholarly praxis as we ‘learn to live’ with geography's many ghosts.