Speculative fabulation: Researching worlds to come in Antarctica

Abstract

This chapter reflects on a specific aspect of on-going research and many years of short-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Antarctic Peninsula. It situates Antarctica anthropologically through accounts of how transient communities think and perceive the Antarctic world they inhabit and how this world inhabits them. The chapter is thus a reflection on these experiences in experimenting ethnographically and creatively with anticipatory and speculative narratives of life in Antarctica and how we are beginning to imagine—and inhabit—an anthropogenic Antarctica. Ethnographic participant-observation was carried out during field sampling by marine biologists and during conversations and meetings on-board the ship and the stations. The chapter examines how speculative fabulation can be mobilized as an ethnographically inflected method to attend to epistemological, ontological, ethical and political implications of doing research in a site like Antarctica.

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