New Research in Arctic Pasts – Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North Part V

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Editor’s Note: This is the introductory post to Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Sarah Pickman.

This introduction marks the start of the fifth edition of the series Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North. Over the past several years, dozens of researchers, writers, artists, and students have shared their work at the intersections of environmental history, visual culture, and Arctic studies in the previous four iterations. Given that we’ve now reached a milestone with the series, the co-editors felt that this was an apt moment to take stock of the field of Arctic visual studies. How did we arrive at this moment? What directions are our colleagues taking with their research? Where might we be headed together? What is driving this continuing, strong interest in the Arctic across environmental and visual history, and the humanities more broadly?

In late 2025, it feels almost tired to say that work in visual studies of the Circumpolar North, and Arctic humanities more broadly, has exploded in recent years. And yet it is important to remember that until relatively recently, this area was understudied, and those who pursued research on the far North were fairly siloed. Though there were some exceptions (Lisa Bloom’s Gender on Ice [1993], Russell Potter’s Arctic Spectacles [2007]), there was fairly little work that crossed between Arctic history and visual culture until the last two decades. Arctic history and media was largely the province of biographers who focused on well-known Southern polar explorers, and scholarship on Indigenous Arctic art was typically the work of a small cadre of anthropologists and collectors. At the same time in art history, discussion of the Arctic was often confined to narratives of wilderness, the sublime, or national identity. Over roughly the last two decades, there has been an explosion in scholarship, public-facing history projects (including major exhibitions like the British Museum’s Arctic: Culture and Climate [2020] and the Nordiska Museet The Arctic – While the Ice is Melting [2019-ongoing]), and artistic interventions and collaborations centered on the Arctic, all with a strong visual focus. But why now?

Arctic sea ice maximum, March 6, 2023. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

One reason often thrown around is the urgency of climate warming, and the images of a melting Arctic that continue to permeate our public media. A profound sense of loss and anger at anthropogenic climate change has motivated many visual artists and curators to engage with Arctic materials. And while global warming and thawing certainly plays a role, it is not the only trend driving this interest. Residency programs like the Arctic Circle give artists and writers a chance to engage with the circumpolar landscape in their work, while art-science collaborations seek to further dissemination of knowledge of, and increase public engagement with, the Arctic and climate change. Additionally, a renewed geopolitical focus on the region—driven by the same anthropogenic climate change—has inspired environmental historians to analyze Arctic histories and look for moments of continuity that might help guide how we go forward. This impulse to reexamine received narratives of the Circumpolar North entails an obligation to listen for the voices of those often silenced in older narratives, especially voices from the Indigenous communities of the Arctic (for example, the recent Beyond Her Horizons expedition, the funded-project Atiqput: Inuit Oral history and Project Naming). Finally, we might cite a larger interdisciplinary push across the academic landscape—e.g. the creation of initiatives under the banner of “environmental humanities,” “blue humanities,” or “cryosphere studies.” These are often driven by a desire by faculty and students to collaborate, but also perhaps as a reflection of our overall precarious academic situation and the realization that we all need each other in order to have any hope of moving forward. 

Kenojuak Community Centre, Kinngait, Nunavut. September 2024. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

The editors of this series have felt these shifts personally in their own work. Isabelle Gapp came to the field as a trained art historian, but found community among environmental historians who were having conversations about the North and excited about working with images. This shaped the outcome of her first book A Circumpolar Landscape (2024). Sarah Pickman trained in history of science and material culture studies, and found that her colleagues interested in the Arctic spanned disciplines beyond these two areas. Now working as an independent scholar, she has been energized by the deep community of polar researchers working outside of the academy; many of them younger, women or nonbinary and queer, and interested in asking new questions of polar history. Both editors have participated in and led interdisciplinary projects such as From the Floe Edge, Teaching Arctic Environments, Terror Camp, Polar X, and the Modern Expeditions Research Network. This iteration of Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North is driven as much by their personal interest in the rich, cross-disciplinary work their colleagues are pursuing as by a more abstract interest in the landscape of the field. 

Taken June 23, 2019 at Skansbukta, Svalbard, the site of a former gypsum mine, active in 1918 and again in the 1930s. The abandoned boat was likely used to transport gypsum to Longyearbyen for export. Photo: Sarah Pickman.

The abstracts received in response to the call for this series are a reflection of the rich, cross-disciplinary work taking place inside and outside of the academy. The authors in this installment of the series are graduate students, early career researchers, established mid-career academics, independent scholars, and artists and curators working across the globe. They tackle topics ranging from scientific imagery and representations of a melting and thawing Arctic, practices of contemporary Indigenous artists, and the lived experiences of discomfort and danger under a changing climate, to reexaminations of historic visual representations of the Arctic and community-building among emerging Arctic researchers. Together, Part V demonstrates evidence of a field that continues to adapt and work with a set of interdisciplinary tools that further unites people from not-so disparate backgrounds. 

So the question is, where do we go from here? There is no denying that in our field and more globally, the current political and academic situation is pretty dire. One of the benefits of creating and naming a field is that we build a community of people who can share with, support, inspire, and rely on each other. The work in this series is a chance to reflect on how scholarship on visual studies of the Circumpolar North can continue in this (environmental/academic) climate, who we ought to be accountable towards, and how we can help each other.

Feature image: Taken August 24, 2018, in Oqaasut, Greenland. Photo: Sarah Pickman.
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Sarah Pickman

Sarah M. Pickman is an independent historian and freelance writer and editor who studies the intersections of expeditions, extreme environments, and material and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work focuses particularly on British and American polar exploration. She is an Associate Editor for the history of science journal Endeavour.

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