Settlement and unsettlement in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Antarctica

This paper is concerned with Aotearoa/New Zealand’s changing relationship to Antarctica, and the Ross Dependency in particular. Through a consideration of post-colonial theory in the Ross Dependency, it is argued that a productive dialogue about the cultural politics of mainland Aotearoa/New Zealand can be opened up. After some reflections on the post-1945 political and cultural trajectory of the country, attention is given to the place of the Maori and their involvement in the polar continent and Southern Ocean. The adoption of Maori place-names on New Zealand maps of the Ross Dependency is considered further because it helps to illuminate the country’s awkward and incomplete post-colonial transformation. Arguably, such an adoption of Maori place-names in Antarctica contributes to a vision of bicultural harmony. However, this is not a view shared by all observers. Developments affecting the crown agency Antarctica New Zealand, alongside recent heritage projects, are scrutinised further in order to consider how Maori–Pakeha relations influence and define contemporary understandings of New Zealand’s presence in Antarctica. Finally, the paper briefly contemplates how a trans-Tasman dialogue with Australian scholars might enable further analysis into how geographically proximate settler colonies engage with Antarctica and their associated territorial claims to the continent and surrounding ocean

Geologic life:prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene

The diagnostic of the Anthropocene proposes a new geological epoch that designates humans as beings capable of geomorphic force, shaping Earth systems on a par with inhuman forces. This social geology marks an ascendance to inhuman planetary power fuelled by fossil fuels from the Carboniferous. Yet nowhere are the geophysical, genomic, and social narratives of this geologic subjectification considered together to interrogate these geologic capacities, not just in terms of impacts on the Earth, but as forces that subjects share—geologic forces that compose and differentiate corporeal and collective biopolitical formations. I argue in this paper that the concept of the Anthropocene is axiomatic of new understandings of time, matter, and agency for the human as a collective being and as a subject capable of geomorphic acts; a being that not just affects geology, but is an intemperate force within it. This immersion of humanity into geologic time suggests both a remineralisation of the origins of the human and a shift in the human timescale from biological life course to that of epoch and species–life. The paper is structured as a modest conversation between two fossilised subjects that define the imagined origin and ending of the narrative arc of the Anthropocene—one from the prehistory of human origins, the other from the future of the Anthropocene—in a conversation about time, geology, and inhuman becomings. Examining fossils as material and discursive knots in the narrative arc of human becoming, I argue for a ‘geological turn’ that takes seriously not just our biological (or biopolitical) life, but also our geological (or geopolitical) life and its forms of differentiation. Fossils unlock this life–death, time–untimely, corporeal–incorporeal equation, suggesting the need for a theory of the geologic and a reckoning with the forces of mute matter in lively bodies: a corporeality that is driven by inhuman forces. This paper investigates what I am calling “geologic life”—a mineralogical dimension of human composition that remains currently undertheorised in social thought and is directly relevant for the material, temporal, and corporeal conceptualisation of fossil fuels. This geologic life prompts a need to rethink the coherency of the human as a territorialising force of the Earth in its prehistoric, contemporary, and future-orientated incarnation. As such, this paper proposes a speculative theoretical framework for thinking modes of geologic life within the Anthropocene

Arresting vision : a geographical theory of Antarctic light

As a site at the margin of terrestrial systems, Antarctica disrupts the usual practices of visual representation. This thesis investigates, what I call, chronogeographical approaches to visual culture within the Antarctic terrain. The material and theoretical chronogeographies of vision are mapped through the action of light, to elucidate on the shifting terrain of form - that is the Antarctic landscape. Historically, the thesis explores how the 1980s anti-mining campaign, organised by environmental groups challenged the political and visual hegemony of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties. The campaign highlighted the feedback between the circulation of images and initiatives to protect the Antarctic landscape. Situated within this visual economy, the thesis focuses on how representation demarcates abstract and imaginative spaces for the production of the landscape - creating fugitive images of Antarctic spatialities. The thesis follows the fugitive testimony of the image through fields of knowledge, from the arrest and flow of landscape to the aesthetics of mobility. Critical art practice is considered as an interstice that highlights the conditions under which landscapes are given visibility, both cognitively and optically. A stratum of histories, mappings and sitings, structure the investigation into the transmission, materiality, and memory embedded in different media employed in the production of Antarctica. Through this sedimentation of geographies, the thesis proposes that the limits of representation may be found in Antarctica. It is argued that this shattering of commonly available visual languages can be a means to aerate our creative explorations of place. From this site, broader issues about the economy of the visual and the limits of visibility are examined. The thesis concludes that only by attending to the complex geographies of the image can the geopolitical aesthetics of place be accounted for.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Forecast factory: snow globes and weather makers

Snow globes offer a window into imaginary and speculative landscapes. They present landscapes within submerged and drifting scenes. As fixed as they may appear, snow globes are meant to be unsettled, and turned upside down. In this sense, they are at once fixed and dynamic, frozen and transient. In the space of the snow globe we can begin to imagine the shape of imminent environmental disturbances and alterations, especially abrupt climate change. This Weather Permitting project explores how the snow globe is an ideal device for projecting and examining new natures. Drifting snow could as likely be imagined as an apocalyptic ash; the submerged landscapes as images of ruined or flooded landscapes. “Zero Degrees” explores these future and imaginary climate scenarios in the space of snow globes

Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures