In 1964, Bob Erlam, Flo Whyard, and John Scott formed a company that canned dust in Whitehorse, Yukon. The souvenirs labeled “Magic Dust from the Alaska Highway” promised the tantalizing experience of driving the route and were sold to promote the paving of the highway. At the time, only 354 miles of the 1,523-mile road were hard surfaced. Regional interests in the Yukon and northern British Columbia organized a ‘Pave-the-Alaska-Highway’ campaign to tackle the oppressive dust problem. Canned dust was an attempt to raise awareness through irony and irreverence. The cans, for all their apparent absurdity, are an object of interest. These commodities miniaturize and monetize the regional airspaces and airborne particulates of northwestern Canada. They spur inquiry into dust - a fine, discrete matter with variable composition and mutable form.

Rather than sweep dust to the edges, this project focuses on its fugitivity and indeterminacy along the bi-national route of the Alaska Highway to understand how dust travels in the Canadian postwar imaginary. Road dust’s drifting particulates and its expansive, enveloping spatiality, reveal how voluminous forms such as the dust cloud blur boundaries between spatial planes and distort experiences of territory across multiple jurisdictions in northern British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska. It draws from a body of scholarship that constitutes the “volumetric turn”—a discourse in political geography that considers space in three-dimensional terms, with complex heights and depths, instead of as a horizontal, fixed, terrestrial surface. Thinking volumetrically offers attention to road dust as “aerosolized land” borne out of a choreography of particulate matter and wind patterns. This thinking of dust as “aerosolized land” is borrowed from sociocultural anthropologists such as Jerry Zee’s Continents in Dust (2022) and am influenced by broader debates on vertical geopolitics initiated by anthropologist Franck Bille’s Volumetric States (2020) and geographer Stuart Elden’s “Secure the Volume” (2013). Despite efforts to contain or suppress dust’s fugitivity on the Alaska Highway, atmospheric thinking is a key terrain of infrastructural politics in debates over the maintenance of roadways.

Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver in the Geography Department. Her research centers on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of  former Second World War landscapes in Canada and the non-contiguous US, namely Alaska and Hawai‘i. Her writing challenges norms related to wartime preservation and commemoration at former military sites such as wartime incarceration camps and military roads. She earned a PhD (Architecture: History Theory and Society) from UC Berkeley in 2022 with outside fields in Legal History and Ethnic Studies. Her writing is featured in The Funambulist, Places Journal, The Avery Review, Aggregate: Architectural History Collaborative, and Radical History Review in addition to chapters to edited volumes. 

Alina Debyser is a third-year student studying Human Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include material movements, having previously published a piece, “Sand as Shifting Territory: Sand Extraction and Land Reclamation in Singapore” in the Trail Six Undergraduate Journal of Geography, and more recently mapping the afterlives of decommissioned ships through the geographies of shipbreaking. She is also interested in the physical explorations of materials, specifically data physicalization and how sculptural and tactile elements can be incorporated to convey information. Alina is excited to continue with research and combine it with creative outputs.