This interdisciplinary symposium will focus on the curation and production of climate change knowledge in the polar regions within the context of the International Polar Year and will bring together scientists, writers, artists, historians, and social scientists with interests in knowledge about the polar landscape and its broader implications for global climate and society. Drawing together recent discussions in the arts, sciences, and humanities on themes such as climate change, the polar landscape, data, time and technologies of inscription, the symposium will facilitate a broad conversation on the "archives" and "fields" of climate change.

Presentations and papers are invited around the following six themes:
 
- The Core: Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica are among the most startling and challenging archives discovered in recent times. Ice cores contain the climate history of the planet. The ice core is a timeline, including pre-history (Earth history) and human history. What does the core tell us about climate change and how do we get this knowledge from the core? How is the core extracted, curated, and interpreted into the discourse of climate change? What is the nature of "core" histories?
 
- Edge Spaces: Outer Space and Polar Space: The poles have moved from the periphery to the center of histories of the Earth. First conceived as the habitats of extremity and legend, they have been filled in with maps of human and geophysical experience. The purpose of this section of the workshop is to chart the poles chronologically and thematically with reference to different kinds of charts: those of explorers, imaginative geographies of outer and inner space, geopolitical, resource, and climate.
 
- Exploration Narratives and Images: Between the field and the archive lie exploration narratives and images that attempt to capture the fleeting and precarious existence of exploration at the poles. How do these narratives gather and assemble assorted facts in the course of explorers' travels? How do explorers' narratives and artists' images interact with histories of science and to what extent do such narratives compensate for the nature of the polar experience?
 
- Instruments and Spaces of Curation: Explorers since the nineteenth century have sought to measure, sample, and "bring back" the poles to field stations, observatories, museums, and laboratories for comparison and analysis. How do instruments enable the curation of the polar landscape through methods of extraction, recording, and classification? How do the things that pass through the instruments of curation come to stand for the poles?
 
- Worlds of Data: The climate model is only the latest iteration of centuries of numerical calculation of climate parameters and variables. How does this numerical processing produce syntheses and trends from the disassembled experiences and extractions of polar exploration and science? What techniques of organization and theoretical assumptions underpin the processing of data? How have these changed over time, and how has this changed our perception of the poles and informed our knowledge of climate change?
 
- Polar Imaginations: Public interest in and knowledge of the poles has always been mediated by cultural productions, from plays and artworks to natural history documentaries. How do these productions inform our images of the poles and how have these changed over time? Furthermore, how do such cultural outputs themselves support the willingness of the public to fund and engage in polar exploration and science? How do they help us to understand the complex science and cultural effects of climate change?

Authors should submit the title of their paper, 500-word abstract, and 150-word bio, and also indicate for which session their paper/presentation is intended. This information should be sent by Wednesday, 1 August 2007 to:
Kathryn Yusoff
Open University
E-mail: k.yusoff@open.ac.uk