Polar Futurism and the Labors of Knowledge Production

• Main Author: Adams, Spencer
• Other Authors: Zakariya, Nasser
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2023
• Subjects: Rhetoric and Composition; Science history; Anthropocene; Knowledge Work; Polar Geographies; Science & Technology Studies; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75r6j67q

Over nearly the last century, Antarctic research stations have been central to the production of knowledge of the “global environment.” Below the “global environment” however, inhabitants of these stations, including scientists, technicians, and operational laborers, have had to negotiate their own relations to the Antarctic’s extreme, hostile, and unforgiving environment, as part of the ongoing reproduction of their everyday life and labors. This dissertation asks how these inhabitants have done so, what ad hoc, low-level, and contingent environmental knowledges have been produced therefrom, and what features of Antarctic inhabitance have emerged as key determinants of the conditions of living and working there beyond the sheer climatic and geophysical extremity of the continent. In doing so, I focus in on Antarctica as an acute site of “knowledge work,” thought broadly to encompass the wide range of labors—scientific, technical, logistical, operational, service-oriented—that underwrite the ongoing production of scientific knowledge on the continent. Looking in particular at the history of UK and US Antarctic research stations from their early institutional founding to the present, I argue that this history sees “knowledge work,” once a relatively autonomous and exceptional enterprise in Antarctica, increasingly subsumed under the normative conditions of contemporary professional work in the capitalist world. I argue moreover that this has been facilitated through socio-technical interventions that work to “exteriorize” collective wisdom, knowledge, habit, and practice cultivated as part of the integrated life of the base onto new technical and institutional forms that project an image of the Antarctic outward to the wider world. This image has become the basis for a widespread discursive linkage, termed polar futurism in the dissertation, between Antarctic inhabitance and the forthcoming conditions of the Anthropocene.The four chapters of the dissertation take up this polar futurism, seeing in speculative ...