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The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) has awarded the Ludwik Fleck Prize of 2026 to Jen Rose Smith for her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic, Duke University Press.
The Fleck Prize, first awarded in 1992, recognizes an outstanding book in the area of Science and Technology Studies (STS). For the 2026 prize, the Committee reviewed more than 35 books and evaluated nominated books on their contributions to the field of science and technology studies, their novelty, and their overall scholarly quality.
Jen Rose Smith’s Ice Geographies carefully brings both Indigenous methods and STS analyses to the critical study of ice as glaciers, as living beings, as hair, as terrain, as melting, as imaginaries, and as data. Beautifully written, the book shows how Indigenous studies compliments STS and importantly brings its own knowledges and values to the ways science has taken up ice and its melting. Focused on Alaskan ice that is part of dAXunhyuu worlds and intimacies, Ice Geographies demonstrates the problematic tendencies that are embedded in so much of the scientific study of ice. It offers the concept of temperate-normativity, which names the myth that only from temperate zones can civilizations and modernity properly emerge, and hence that tropical and ice geographies produce inferior forms of human subjectivity. The book speaks back to the ways the melting of a glacier in dAXunhyuu territory is made by an imperial science to matter to the coast of New York City, or global climate forecasts, or as a stand-in for Mars, rather than be held as a singularity and humble co-creation being disrupted and therefore eliciting specific forms of mourning, learning, and loss for those people and nonhumans in intimate relation to it.
The book weaves together poetry, experience, and historical archives to undertake what it describes as a method of “careful guessing.” Careful guessing makes space for emptiness, for letting go of the hubris of trying for full knowledge. Careful guessing recognizes spaces of unknowing, both because there is always some unknowingness in relation to a matter, but also because some knowledges and relations have been stolen from Indigenous people and so an emptiness must be held. Careful guessing insists on the impossibility of objectivity, and instead takes up an ethic of anti-colonial working that does its best to narrate an account that is accountable to place and peoples. In so doing, Ice Geographies teaches us to approach relations to matter in manifold ways not plottable to universal time, offering lessons on how ice is both hard and soft, disappearing and enduring, cute and prickly, grieved and mysterious. In this era of drastic environmental change, the book offers us a model of how Indigenous methodologies can meet up with STS to arrive at more fulsome, more humble, more empty, and more accountable guesses.
I extend my sincere gratitude to the committee for their time, attention, care and service. It's an honor to be chosen for this award, and in conversation with STS thinkers and scholars—I benefit immensely from the critical scholarship of this community. Indigenous feminist STS in particular has shaped my thinking considerably and there is much left to learn. This book was written in grateful relation with the many supportive colleagues, friends, and family in my life and Indigenous places where I have lived over the last many years. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to explore the many ways that ice makes social, political, and physical worlds in the chapters of Ice Geographies. I hope that it provides a place of entry into thinking about ice in a time of changing climates that asks for a slow, critical pace and for interfaces that do not have easy, simple answers but instead ask for further complexity and nuance. I feel grateful to the readers of this text who might find it helpful and offer it to students as a place of engagement.
Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) is an associate professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington-Seattle. “Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic” (Duke University Press) is her first book, and she has published in EPD: Society and Space, The Geographical Journal, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes language and cultural revitalization gatherings.
Honorable Mentions
There are two honorable mentions this year and they go to:
The 4S Fleck Prize Committee this year is comprised of Hallam Stevens, Wen-Hua Kuo, M. Murphy, and Yichen Rao.