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Behind the brief summaries that adorn any description of the four International Polar Years, historians have yet to write detailed histories of these events. This project goes to the heart of the problem by investigating the key scientific institutions in the polar regions themselves – the field stations. They have been one of the most salient and tangible features of IPYs since 1882–83 and through to the coming IPY 2007–08. The polar station is a modern feature, the smaller field cousin of the Laboratory, Instrument, or Observatory. It is a nexus, and a place, where a number of central features of the modern scientific enterprise – laboratory practices and methods, precision instruments, territorial claims – meet in the landscape and sometimes in close vicinity of local groups and populations. As a result field stations have played a crucial role in defining how science is organized and coordinated in the field – a central theme of international polar years.
International field stations have become inseparable from polar research, often serving as geopolitical symbols of political, diplomatic and economic ambitions of the nations to which their founders belonged. Beneath the veneer of international cooperation, there have often been scenes of dramatic tension between national scientific traditions, with teams known to compete over shared facilities and resources, or working covertly with their own instruments and methods. And yet successive international polar years have promoted the idea that international cooperation and transparency is a precondition if the results of scientific research are to have global validity beyond national borders. Our project recognizes that this is no less a problem in historical and political cross–cultural understanding than it is of calibrating experiments across time and space.
The projects for this International Polar Year for the first time acknowledge the importance to science of the full range of stakeholders living and working in the polar regions: local experts, settlers, technicians, as well as scientists. The hidden labour on which the sciences depend is in fact a general feature of both the field and laboratory sciences. Our group aims to uncover these hidden histories across all of the international polar years, particularly the agendas, practices, and politics of the indigenous and settler land use and tenure around scientific field stations. By revealing the extent to which scientific research has depended on the knowledge and support of a wide range of groups, there is a much greater chance that research will continue to be respected and make a positive contribution to northern societies. Those high standards will be the measure by which international scientific events will be judged.
However, field stations remain a surprisingly neglected element in the study of the creation of scientific knowledge, and in relation to science diplomacy and geopolitical conflict. We also know very little about the Arctic archipelago of IPY stations and their significance, some of them more a century old. Nor are yet sufficiently clear about their cultural and historical status – field stations are also legacies of past ambitions, a heritage in landscapes which was shared by science with local groups and indigenous peoples.
International field stations have become inseparable from polar research, often serving as geopolitical symbols of political, diplomatic and economic ambitions of the nations to which their founders belonged. Beneath the veneer of international cooperation, there have often been scenes of dramatic tension between national scientific traditions, with teams known to compete over shared facilities and resources, or working covertly with their own instruments and methods. And yet successive international polar years have promoted the idea that international cooperation and transparency is a precondition if the results of scientific research are to have global validity beyond national borders. Our project recognizes that this is no less a problem in historical and political cross–cultural understanding than it is of calibrating experiments across time and space.
The projects for this International Polar Year for the first time acknowledge the importance to science of the full range of stakeholders living and working in the polar regions: local experts, settlers, technicians, as well as scientists. The hidden labour on which the sciences depend is in fact a general feature of both the field and laboratory sciences. Our group aims to uncover these hidden histories across all of the international polar years, particularly the agendas, practices, and politics of the indigenous and settler land use and tenure around scientific field stations. By revealing the extent to which scientific research has depended on the knowledge and support of a wide range of groups, there is a much greater chance that research will continue to be respected and make a positive contribution to northern societies. Those high standards will be the measure by which international scientific events will be judged.
However, field stations remain a surprisingly neglected element in the study of the creation of scientific knowledge, and in relation to science diplomacy and geopolitical conflict. We also know very little about the Arctic archipelago of IPY stations and their significance, some of them more a century old. Nor are yet sufficiently clear about their cultural and historical status – field stations are also legacies of past ambitions, a heritage in landscapes which was shared by science with local groups and indigenous peoples.
