"In this ethnography of the contemporary lived experience of Inuit in Arviat, Nunavut, van den Scott examines the relationship between colonialism and the built environment. As she introduces a sociology of walls, she acknowledges how people in Arviat are both oppressed by their Western walls and perform resilience within them"--
Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls explores these effects in the context of Arviat, Nunavut. Van den Scott lays out the inherent social processes, arguing that walls, in addition to concealing colonial power relations, are boundary objects, cultural objects, and technological objects. Van den Scott's ethnography of Arviammiut's (people of Arviat's) contemporary lived experiences reveals the ways in which Arviammiut are living in a foreign space, how this impacts their experiences, and how they exercise agency in navigating and reinventing these spaces in resilient and heterogenous ways.
In this ethnography of the contemporary lived experience of Inuit in Arviat, Nunavut, van den Scott examines the relationship between colonialism and the built environment. As she introduces a sociology of walls, she acknowledges how people in Arviat are both oppressed by their Western walls and perform resilience within them.
