<TITLE: Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 1: Polar Regions in Politics of Representation
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: humanities
DISCIPLINE: cultural studies
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE01A
NOTES: continued in CDIS01C, session also includes presentations CPRE01B-C (CDIS01A-B and CDIS01D are part of the same conference), poor sound quality

RECORDING DURATION: 14 min 13 sec

RECORDING DATE: 1.7.2002

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 29

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S1: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Finnish; ACADEMIC ROLE: unknown; GENDER: female; AGE: 31-50

SS: several simultaneous speakers>


<S1> <START MISSING> strong connection with polar regions and i've been going through history especially , you want to turn back , history of polar cartography history of polar science and practises of representing polar regions in cu- current climate change discourses and now i'm going to really have a running exercise of going through the different pictures i hope that you can bare with me because i wanted to use a lots of pictures so let's start with the history of polar cartography and we could go back to the ancient times greek greek scientists but i spent (xx) that erm i will go to middle me- mediaeval ages and throughout this history of polar cartography there's of course theoretical presentational space , centre and periphery the centre of the north have changed in in throughout the centuries but it's quite clear that polar regions have always been in a periphery periphery in some sense or the other and polar region throughout (xx) representation the other periphery is the difference between the i- the centre of the periphery is marked er using monsters which is (xx) horrors of nature to make this difference and the whole history of polar cartography is mostly , representing the polar regions for outsiders by outsiders i mean that there have been er british dutch french , portuguese explorers who have travelled these in the oceans in the near the polar regions and then they've come back with the information and then central european map makers have done their interpretations of those stories and it is a interesting combination of imagination and stories to compose let's go to the the mediaeval age er this is the way they saw the world you probably the arctic er polar view the the both polar regions were represented as (xx) regions and this other picture here shows the way of understanding world consisting of asia europe and africa . and then we come to the middle right where er we c- we can see that they're both in in this map (xx) use er you can see that there were ideas of continents both in the south and in the north and this goes back in the ancient times and the funny thing here or i s- sort of (xx) that these er polar continents came and came and disappeared reappeared and they were redefined there's a lots er huge stories lots of interesting stories behind those representations , and from the arctic point of view it's an interesting combination of stories and imaginations at the end of 16th century there were already explorers like you know (barents) travelling in er in scandinavia going to the russian shore and this part of of this map is based on on his stories so this was sort of there's supreme information and this part of the map representing the arctic as consisting four islands rivers er a garden of eden and things like that was based stories by nicholas of lynn who was supposed to be travelled in the 14th century across the northern seas and he invented he created on this trip this map called inventio fortunata which has not survived but descriptions of that map survived and that may be because of that time used used those er descriptions to ma- make their representations of the arctic . and the situation at the end of 19th century was that also the northern regions were , were somehow covered by geographical information but as you see the north pole here is is a white white spot that was not covered yet then and the case with the er polar the other or southern with the southern parts er the southern continent was that at the end of the 19th century it's not clear whether there is a a continent or is it a group of island or maybe there's just nothing really there in the south . and this is one one from er adolf steeler 1875 it is this collection of maps er so-called dave drumsy collection that's the er , that's the address where you can find these pictures and you can see it was also very much white white area there was not enough information to fill that space , and at at time before this time the people used to used to even if there was not enough information available they used the imaginations and filled these regions with all sorts of imaginative creatures but er this thought er the idea of er the way the people map makers wanted to represent was to use blank blank space . er the problem continues until today i know that (xx) are very familiar i guess with these pictures of the the problem of of how to represent the world and here is the on the er right hand side because the tradition we have the potention and with this po- potention by peters from early i think from early 1970s and the interesting point from er from the perspective of polar region is is there is there any can you s- find the polar regions in these in these potentions and from the arctic point of view for example if you look at the america the potention which is currently used still today if you compare the size of greenland and the size of africa and you (xx) representation of reality because er as far as i understand africa is at least 15 times bigger than greenland and the peters map er tries to correct those let's have a look , tries to show the si- size of the regions in in more realistic term way , okay that's a very short discussion about the about the history of polar cartography and then we come to this real polar science which i think is another er theory that influences the way what we want to see the polar regions in in light of discourses as somehow together and there is o- quite long history of scientific interest in glaciers coming er going back to the early 19th century and there has been a history of scientific cooperation in polar regions and and er but that has changed lately and what is really er the newest change in these scientific discourses is that very slowly at least in the arctic context the newer dimension of global change is emerging , and what i mean with this scientific interest in polar regions is that the first polar year was organised in 1882 and 1883 and is this history is connected to the to history of explorations because this first polar year was suggested by karl weyprecht an austrian er explorer and he was really unhappy with the way explorers travelled in these northern regions he he wanted more scientific approach to these explorations and by his suggestion then international cooperation was organised and there were 13 stations established in this time er and one station established in antarctica and then another s- , polar year was er organised in 1932 and i think 33 and again the most of the activity took place in the arctic but more stations were established in the antarctic degree and i think in this picture it's really nice how the way er this shows at least to my eyes how emphasis in scientific cooperation changed from er the late er the beginning of 1930s to to 1950s because in this picture you see the focus is on south pole and that is actually tru- true that international attention and international cooperation was focused there and i guess the the (political) foundation that was the and that's how they tried to do something about all these different land capes on on antarctica . and i'm going to jump this and my point here is coming back to the kind coming to the kind (xx) representations for whom and who as a sort of (xx) i'm interested in human dimensions in these representations and the connections between imagined conceptualised and experienced and i guess this er my point is that still today pretty much the polar regions these presentations of polar regions are clearly by outsiders to outsiders and i can see i i can briefly explain that what i mean what i (form is like a) pictures this is one of the new united nations (xx) programme and the in- most interesting point here is who is representing the human populations in the arc- arctic nobody there's a lonely polar bear there <SS> @@ </SS> , reasons to why IPCC tries to , er describe the the regional diversity er of the south pole you can see i guess ice and penguins if you look really carefully i'm sorry about the quality of the picture and the north i think that's midnight sun . and and the AMAP has a very scientific approach this is the arctic monitorial assessment programme and this i've chosen this picture because this is the only er visual presentation of the that they have in this file the report that describes climate change in the arctic and to me it's very strange because there's lots of pictures of of different kinds of globes but they decided to avoid the globe picture and they sort of separate the reality from of course the scientific logic here this is like how C-O-2 and methane and other stuff release er moves in the atmosphere and not much of a fume or action here yeah , and there's one picture of arctic climate impact assessment and coming these pictures are more to i think easier to see the see the politics of pictures and again polar bear seems to represent whatever , er mhm non-naturalist (xx) because (xx) some kind of action in these regions again you can all see a difference between the arctic programme and antarctic programme in WWF their representations here are the same really ice cold and and this is interesting picture this is a sort of ho- hot spots of of the polar er climate change in different parts of the world and even if in the northern regions there are you can see these little marks where you can go and look for for- further information what is happening er in the in the arctic they don't have a separate arctic region they have antarctic region where you can go especially to find antarctic information so in this , er website er arctic sort of is missed in the regional representation . and my point here is that and i have been put this representations because i think they are sort of stuck in time because especially er if you think about what is probably going to happen in the future this is er rather recent from last year er new pictures by this programme called global intoxic human actions or something like that and this is a sort of the logic of these pictures is that er the red is considerable human impacts and the the yellow is moderate and green is no no human impact and the point here is that in the next next 50 years or so the arctic will change considerably due to due to different human actions there is oil and gas explorations and things like that but in the public life in atmosphere i think the representations are stuck in some past view of the past and that's my point that i made i skip the theoretical part thank you for your attention </S1>
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