Abstract

Writing about the polar regions takes many forms. As politics and global commodity prices have dramatically increased, how has this impacted on polar writing and what are the implications for us as a community of scholarly practitioners? On the one hand, our goals and standards of academic success are defined by our institutions very clearly in terms of peer-reviewed articles and monographs. On the other hand, the circulation of informed opinion and analysis in the polar regions is taking place through a remarkably diverse range of media, forms, and genre: blogs, digests, videos, image banks, think tank reports, legal opinions environmental awareness-raising, as well as articles and books. In this discussion, I would like us to think about the way in which the use of these media and genres give rise to different kinds of authorial voices and ways of “narrating the polar regions”. This will give us an opportunity to reflect on how our own writing practices and aspirations can respond to this rapidly shifting field within which polar analysis circulates.