Social Science Research Council

"Policy and Practice in Antarctic Specially Managed Areas"

The McMurdo Dry Valleys sit near Ross Island, the most populous human settlement in Antarctica. Windswept, mountainous, and free of snow, the Dry Valleys are an anomaly in a great white continent, attracting scientists and an increasing amount of attention from tourists and environmentalists. The Antarctic Treaty mandate of managing Antarctica to promote both "peace" and "science" has brought forth the Specially Managed Area (SMA), which contains zones- research sites, tourist areas, and "no-go" zones where no human will be permitted to be at any time-to protect specific environmental "values." In June 2004, McMurdo Dry Valleys SMA was the first internationally approved Antarctic SMA and is now being jointly implemented by the New Zealand and United States Antarctic programs. In Antarctic society, scientific expertise and authority, as well as conceptions of the Antarctic place, must be constantly shaped through policy and practice. In my research, I will ask; what are the practices-discursive and otherwise-through which scientists and other Antarctic community members succeed at making Antarctica a model of environmentalism as well as a place of "peace and science"? To answer this question, I will conduct fifteen months of fieldwork in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland, and on a research expedition near Scott Base, Antarctica. I will examine the lived intricacies of this international environmental space and people's relationship to Antarctic environmental management by mapping, examining, and traveling within the networks that scientists and other Antarcticans form. How (and how convincingly) has "Antarctica" become this particular place of peace and international security? I will look at Antarctic place making through the peculiar roles that science has had in the brief human history of Antarctic exploration and research. Scientists, too, are complex subjects in my study, involved with Antarctica through shifting linkages of themselves as scientists and politicians.