"The only almost germ-free continent left" : pandemics and purity in cultural perceptions of Antarctica

This article examines the role of pandemics and viruses in cultural perceptions of Antarctica over the past century. In the popular imagination, Antarctica has often been framed as a place of purity, refuge, and isolation. In a series of fiction and screen texts from the nineteenth century to the present, viruses feature prominently. The texts fall into two categories: narratives in which Antarctica is the sole source of safety in a pandemic-ravaged world and those in which a virus (or another form of contagion) is discovered within the continent itself and needs to be contained. Viruses in these texts are not only literal but also metaphorical, taking the form of any kind of threatening infection, and as such are linked to texts in which Antarctic purity is discursively connected to racial and gendered exclusivity. Based on this comparison, the article argues that ideas of containment and contagion can have political connotations in an Antarctic context, to the extent that they are applied to particular groups of people in order to position them as “alien” to the Antarctic environment. The authors show that the recent media construction of Antarctica during COVID-19 needs to be understood against this disturbing aspect of the Antarctic imaginary, and also that narratives of Antarctic purity are imaginatively linked to both geopolitical exclusions and the melting of Antarctic ice.A research program supported by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) on the implications of COVID-19 on Antarctica, and financial support by SCAR; partly financially supported by the South African National Research Foundation’s National Antarctic Programme (SANAP).http://environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/am2024EnglishSDG-03:Good heatlh and well-bein

Antarctic Cities. Volume 4, Principles for Antarctic Connectivity

Principles for Antarctic Connectivity brings together the values associated with the Antarctic Treaty System in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It is an initiative to bring together cities together in ways that outline a common vision, narrative and priorities. Antarctica is one of four internationally recognized global commons along with the atmosphere, the high seas and outer space. These are all areas that have historically been guided by the principle of the common heritage of humankind. However, there is no comprehensive charter of principles for Antarctic engagement. The present charter ‘Principles for Antarctic Connectivity’ seeks to provide such a set of guidelines. The continent is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, a complex set of arrangements developed to regulate relations between states with interests and territorial claims in the region. There are five main articles to the treaty that have a principle-like quality (see Appendix 1 for a summary of all the articles): 1. No military use shall be made of Antarctica, though military personnel and equipment may be used for peaceful purposes. 2. There will be complete freedom of scientific investigation. 3. Antarctic Treaty Nations will exchange plans for their scientific programmes. Scientific data will be freely available and scientists will be exchanged between expeditions where practical. 4. All territorial claims are put aside for the duration of the Treaty. No activities under the Treaty will affect claims to sovereignty of any part of Antarctica made by any nation. 5. Nuclear explosions and nuclear waste disposal are banned from Antarctica. As of today, 29 states are ‘consultative parties’ to the Treaty. They demonstrate their interest in Antarctica by carrying out substantial scientific activity there. The Treaty articles are geographically directed towards activities in Antarctica. This charter, by comparison, is not geographically contained but pertains to all activities that have a bearing on the Antarctic region

Antarctic Cities. Volume 3, Antarctic Connectivity Index

The Antarctic Connectivity Index is an innovative and comprehensive instrument developed through a collaborative project involving a number of universities, agencies and cities. It provides an evidence-based means of showing the various levels of connectivity of cities as they engage with Antarctica. This Antarctic Connectivity Index seeks to understand the level and nature of the connections of cities across the world to the Antarctic region. For the purposes of this index, the concept of ‘the Antarctic region’ includes Antarctica, the Southern Ocean and the sub-Antarctic region. The notion of ‘connectivity’ is used in the deeper historical meaning of the condition of being ‘joined together’ from the Latin conectere, to bind or establish a relationship—rather than the contemporary thinning out of the concept as the establishment of a mediated communications channel. This mean that the connectivity is understood across a range of domains—ecological, economic, political, and cultural—rather than limited to communications technologies and other infrastructural means of connection. The Index has been refined through comparative international case studies, surveys and research into current publicly available indicators. As a result of this process, we are at the beta-stage of developing a comprehensive instrument to gauge a city’s current status as an ‘Antarctic city’. The index is intended as a guide to thinking and practice as citizens of these cities contribute to Antarctica’s future. We are keenly interested in the activities of the Antarctic gateway cities and their transition to become Antarctic custodial cities. At the same time, this index is intended to have a global reach and allow for any city to evaluate its connections to the Antarctic. In setting up the index and its variables we have included consideration of cities other than the five gateway cities to bring in different kinds of relations to the Antarctic that are generally applicable

Parents displaying family consumption in Ireland

This article considers qualitative data collected from 78 parents in an Irish study on the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. It makes a distinctive contribution in showing that the framework of family display (Finch, 2007) can be productively applied to the entire field of family consumption. It shows that consumption narratives can be viewed as a tool that is used to display family – in other words, showing how family is done – to internal family members and to outsiders. While family display has been more often applied empirically with non-conventional families, its relevance for all families is reasserted by our data. Our application of the family display framework shows that middle-class parenting ideals are stretched and can become unstuck when displayed by middle-class parents, the constituency most associated with their production and propagation

"A source of anxiety like never before": unpacking the Irish print media sexualisation of children discourse

Drawing on a corpus of articles pertaining to the sexualisation of children in national Irish newspapers (2012-2014) and using tools provided by critical discourse analysis, the discourses in their Irish cultural context are ‘unpacked’ (Egan & Hawkes, 2008) toward identifying their peculiarities but also their similarities with the discourses on the sexualisation of children, produced in other country contexts. The construction of sexualisation as a child protection problem is explored as are its presumed bad effects on children and its required solutions. The age related, gendered and classed cultural assumptions explicit and implicit in the discourses are revealed. The paper concludes with a discussion as to how sexualised childhood and its binary opposite innocent childhood, were mobilised in the print media in the service of agendas, which celebrated and obviated features of Irish societal culture, past and present

Antarctic Cities. Volume 2, Urban Sustainability Profiles

The sustainability profiles of the participating cities were developed by the Antarctic Cities project based on the premise that the cities needed to map and understand their own sustainability in order to understand their capabilities for custodianship. They needed to understand their own strengths and weaknesses — ecologically, economically, politically and culturally — in order to reach out to Antarctica without a false sense of what was possible and without romanticizing what custodianship entails. Put in more general terms, care beyond one’s borders is strengthened by a culture, politics and economy of local care. The profiles are one means of providing an evidence-based understanding of where that care is best directed. In order to map the sustainability of the Antarctic cities in a way that allowed qualitative comparison across these urban regions — municipalities that collect data in relatively incommensurable ways and along quite different variables — we needed a method that could variably integrate data and statistics into a qualitative assessment framework. Hence, we chose the Circles of Sustainability approach.1 The Circles approach offers such an integrated method for practically responding to complex issues of sustainability, resilience, adaptation, and liveability. It is used to guide the cities through the difficult process of responding to complex or seemingly intractable problems and challenges associated with building long-term sustainability. The approach builds upon the strengths of a research program developed in association with Metropolis, the UN Global Compact Cities Programme, World Vision and a number of other key international organizations. It was developed through practical engagement in cities around the world including Berlin, Melbourne, Milwaukee, New Delhi, Porto Alegre, San Francisco, and Valletta, to name a few.2 The Circles of Sustainability profile process is intended as a way of developing an interpretative description of the sustainability of an urban region and its immediate hinterland. Here sustainability is understood in relation to local, national, and global processes: ecological, economic, political and cultural. The Circles of Sustainability process is considered part of the more general Circles of Social Life assessment process, which includes considerations of vitality, productivity, relationality and sustainability (including resilience and adaptation).3 This meant that the other elements of the work — the Connectivity Index and the Principles of Antarctic Engagement — could be developed using the same matrix of variables. The sustainability profile template is intended as way of developing a more comprehensive understanding of an ‘urban region’—in this case, Hobart. By responding to the questions in the Urban Profile Question it is possible to generate a clear and simple graphic representation of the sustainability profile of that region. Examples are shown in Figure 1 (next page) for representative cities around the world. The Urban Profile process works on the basis of a four-domain model. Each domain is divided into seven perspectives (as set out in Table 1 below), and seven questions are asked about each perspective (see the questionnaire that follows in this document)

Eggs, emperors and empire: Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s ‘Worst journey’ as imperial quest Romance

Antarctic exploration in the ‘Heroic Era’ (the early twentieth century) is often represented as the last gasp of British imperialism — an attempt to occupy empty, uninhabited and more-or-less useless territory at a time when the rest of the empire was beginning to crumble.1 Of British Heroic-Era exploits, three stories in particular preoccupy the present popular imagination2: Robert F. Scott’s ill-fated journey to the Pole with his four companions, as famously related in his posthumously published journal; a slightly earlier journey to Cape Crozier by three of Scott’s expedition members in search of Emperor penguins’ eggs, as told by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in a chapter of his 1922 travel memoir The Worst Journey in the World; and the story of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans- Antarctic Expedition, in which his ship, The Endurance, was imprisoned and later crushed by ice, leaving the men to survive on ice-floes and a subantarctic island

A Biography of Iceberg B09B

Icebergs have taken on dramatic new meanings in the Anthropocene. They have long been used as metaphors for an immensity present but unseen, but in the age of anthropogenic warming they also metonymically suggest unstable icesheets, shrinking glaciers and rising seas. Outside of scientific discourse, however, icebergs tend to be considered as a collective, interesting both in their symbolism and materiality, but rarely treated as individual objects with their own histories and futures. In this article, we canvas some of the ways in which humanities researchers have recently been thinking about ice, and in response offer a brief biography of the iceberg B09B, focusing particularly on its intersection with the human history of Antarctica. B09B\u27s lifetime, which thus far has spanned almost thirty years, has seen significant changes in the Antarctic region: the advent of large-scale tourism; a new focus on heritage, including the historic huts of the region from the \u27heroic era\u27 of exploration; the implementation of an international protocol with stringent protections of the environment; and the impact of climate change, manifest particularly in ice shelf instability and glacial retreat in West Antarctica. B09B was by no means a passive bystander in these events. Always entwined with human history, in late 2011 B09B lodged itself in Commonwealth Bay, the location of Mawson\u27s Huts Historic Site, hampering centenary celebrations of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-14), putting a stop to tourist visits for over half a decade, playing havoc with the local ecosystem, ocean circulation, and ice production, and contributing to the besetting of a private research expedition-an event that in turn generated a media controversy. The iceberg became embroiled in a complex story of heritage, tourism, citizen science, Australian nationalism and climate change. The still-unfolding history of B09B is a reminder that Antarctica\u27s history, far from that of a pure wilderness, is one of interwoven natural and cultural objects, actions and events