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Mansfield Fellow in Geography Richard Powell runs 'Polar Social Scientists' workshop

Posted on 15.09.11Category: College News, Academic News

Mansfield Geography fellow Richard Powell ran an Early Career Workshop on 8 September 2011 in Mansfield College. This is one of four workshops in an ESRC Seminar Series, ‘Knowledges, Resources and Legal Regimes: The New Geopolitics of the Polar Regions’, designed to investigate critically the contemporary Arctic and Antarctic.

The Polar Regions have recently returned to widespread public attention. Media reports of melting sea ice, the plight of polar bears, the sustainability of indigenous livelihoods and the claiming of the Arctic and Antarctic seabeds have garnered international interest. Geopolitical machinations in both Polar Regions have been in evidence, from the building of new scientific bases to the commissioning of replacement icebreakers. Meanwhile, oceanographic and geophysical research has gathered momentum within the context of evidentiary submissions of extended continental shelves to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. Resource speculation, particularly in the Arctic, has added extra interest and verve to policy-related discussions. Such discussions increasingly now involve a range of actors, including not only the coastal states and the Arctic Council, but also regional organizations such as the European Union, extra-regional states such as China, environmental NGOs, and political representatives of indigenous peoples, such as the Inuit Circumpolar Council.