Living and breathing bodies and states: stories of park and place in Seward, Alaska

Senner, Kate

This thesis assembles a patchwork of stories that demonstrate how places and states are continuously constructed through the material work of bodies. It is the result of qualitative research that included 42 open-ended interviews in Seward, Alaska and archival work at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. Bodies ground the often-elusive concepts of place and state, fleshing out both their everyday relevance as well as their mobile and transient nature. Embodiment is a strategic feminist methodological and theoretical positioning that foregrounds the scale of the body (Mountz 2004). Through embodiment, I sketch out an epistemological, theoretical, and methodological framework for knowing small-town Alaska, one that relies less on the expansive imaginaries of vast wilderness and unlimited resources, and one that emphasizes how states and places and people are all three projects that are “cobbled together” (Haraway 1992: 310). Everyday stories from an Alaskan small town about glaciers, transient fishermen and second homebuyers, planned buildings that do not exist, and ghosts together illustrate how places are constructed through the material, everyday work of bodies and also how states can be simultaneously expansive and intangible, grounded and mobile. Throughout the thesis, I build on Kathleen Steward’s (1996: 29) notion that “stories are productive.” I explore the materiality of the language that people in Seward use to describe their town, their lives, and how they imagine their government, creating a collage of stories that double back over Seward’s recent history, constructing and reconstructing places, states, and people.