Mapping Antarctic and Arctic Women: An exploration of polar women’s experiences and contributions through place names

Abstract

Abstract In this commentary, I investigate the Poles differently, and in situ, rather than only as stereotypically barren uninhabited expansive places on a globe or maps. The human stories are behind the relatively white space on which few place names are marked. But the more visible ones are made and told through a male-dominated, colonial narrator and mapmaker, until more recently. Cartography, like history, has overwhelmingly documented men’s worlds, stories, dominations and accomplishments, creating a virtual whiteout of women’s and notably Indigenous women’s stories also in polar regions. In this commentary, I report on a journey into (re)mapmaking I did of women’s stories told through female place names and toponymies of women especially in the Antarctic, through a crowd-sourced project, Mapping Antarctic Women. I explore not only mapping female place names and women’s stories in the Arctic, exploring gendered, colonial and western culture mapping but also newer digital Indigenous place name mapping and also mapping of human-exacerbated changes in the ice that makes the Antarctic map.