Frozen Waters
Encounters with Snow
Montreal receives an average of over 200 cm of snow every year, which is more than enough to shape the city’s landscape and affect the daily life of Montrealers for many months of the year.
Members of the Waterways working group inquired into the many ways Montrealers engage with snow and the spaces it creates from 2019 to 2023.
One of the key outputs from the project was the article “Encounters with Urban Glaciers: Notes Toward an Ethnography of the Snow Dump” by Tricia Toso and Pier-Olivier Tremblay in which they engage with a number of questions about the cultural framing and ideologies, politics and policies, temporalities and lived realities of snow in an urban environment. Specifically in this piece, they tackle the question ‘Where does the snow go?’ In so doing, they explore how settler colonial logics of extraction reimagine snow as waste leading to the creation of urban glaciers. Their complex account of the stories of these urban glaciers prompts a reconsideration of our relation to urban snow.
Frozen waters also resulted in a series of three blog posts written by Melina Campos Ortiz, entitled Abolissonsles Tropiques that looks at Melina’s own engagement with Montreal’s frozen waters through autoethnography. You can read part one, part two, and part three on our blog.
