On the Brinck
This annual competition honors contemporary and emerging values in design by celebrating books that offer new perspectives and resonate with the formative writings of J.B. Jackson. The selection criteria for this competition come directly from Jackson’s enlightened approach to scholarship: emphasizing new and overlooked areas of study, challenging existing scholarship, integrating allied disciplines, and appealing to a broad readership.
2025 On the Brinck Award Winners
The University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning (UNM SA+P ) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 On the Brinck Book Award and Lecture series, created in honor of John Brinckerhoff Jackson.
Smith, Jen Rose, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic, Duke University Press, 2025
Smith investigates ice as a material, as a place, and as an ideology. In a concise, effective, and well researched narrative, she changes how we think about land/water/ice, turning around conceptions of dead, lifeless, spaces to rich inhabited arctic places. In a literal new materialism, Smith’s ice has agency in her indigenous ontologies of the Arctic. This volume weaves multi-disciplinary modes of expression from lyric reflection to art critique to place based politics. The jury appreciated the description of local, detailed, and lived-in places as well as Smith’s expansive theory of the connections of those places through the conditions of arctic-ness. This book makes a definitive contribution by pushing back assumptions about people who live in, around, and on ice and the nature of those places themselves. In the context of climate change and the rapid disappearance of ice, Smith’s work offers engagement beyond memorialization using a framework she calls “careful guesswork.” This work weaves a startling and embodied relationship to ice for her readers in an excellent mix of approaches to environmental humanities research, material studies, and indigenous studies research.