The accelerating climate change has turned the Arctic into a hotspot of intertwined ecological, economic, and political processes, with an unprecedented impact on life in the region. I have explored these changes ethnographically through the lens of Cold Rush, understood as an intensified race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. My focus has been on how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing and multidirectional change.

To examine and explain this complex change, I applied assemblage thinking by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) with critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical approaches. In this paper, I will discuss the key takeaways of critical assemblage analysis. This framework, I will argue, suggests three shifts for sociolinguistic research: a move from singularity to multiplicity, from essences to processes, and from representation to production. It provides an alternative way to explore the dynamics between language and society, one that helps us to understand how material and discursive, human and nonhuman are interconnected and interdependent.