Writing Feature

As the expedition leader, Devine set out to recruit volunteers — in an era, it should be noted for perspective, when efforts of this sort were coordinated via fax and derailed by such disasters as blowing a slide projector. In addition to a program manager, an Antarctic veteran, and a biologist, she hired Wendy Trusler — a visual artist and chef renowned for cooking at tree-planting camps throughout Northern Canada.

So began a most unusual and vitalizing collaboration between the women, which would become, twenty years later, The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning: A Polar Journey, an extraordinary tome blending the enchantment of Thoreau-like journaling (“A brilliant morning. Sun turns berg in bay into gold.”), the fascination of scientific observation and philosophical reflection (“[The Chilean Commandante] said you can’t write about something of which you are not a part. I disagreed, and agreed.”)

Carol Devine, Charlie Hewitt, Tahnee Prior

Mapping Women+ of The Arctic (Mapping WoA+) is an interactive and participatory digital cartography project fitting squarely within contemporary polar social science research, methodologies, and dialogue on the history, future, and gender dimensions of the Arctic. This multidisciplinary project – of a region with prevalent colonial and male-dominated stories of discovery, exploration, cartography, place-naming, and impact – shines a spotlight on women+’s (anyone who identifies as a woman) contributions to the Arctic. It highlights their stories within Polar history, especially in the Arctic. Their contributions have largely gone undocumented or are lesser known, as are those of Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ individuals. Inspired by Devine’s sister crow-mapping project, Mapping Antarctic Women, inspired by an ecological expedition she led to the Antarctic peninsula.

Carol Devine, Tahnee Prior & Gosia Smieszek

Maps can beautifully and, at times, wistfully tell us the story of us. However cartography, like history, often overwhelmingly documents the worlds, stories, and accomplishments of men. In these stories, the contributions of women, especially Indigenous women, rarely make it onto the map. This holds true in the Arctic as well. In this commentary, we explore the gendered dimension of map-making, honour the rare yet pivotal examples of female cartography, introduce Mapping Women of the Arctic, a way of re-imagining the Arctic through female placenames, and encourage readers to locate and highlight women’s contributions to the sciences, arts, policy, culture, diplomacy, history, exploration, and more. Mapping Women of the Arctic is a new, crowdsourced map-making initiative that seeks to celebrate and mark the unsung achievements of women in the Arctic.

For samples of creative and other writing see Chill Perspectives: What Ice can teach us about ourselves and our world, Carol Devine in conversation with glaciologists M Jackson and Erin Pettit in Parley for the Oceans, Aquamess: Our Synthetic Footprints On Top of the World in Parley for the Oceans, The Moon, the Stars and a Scar: Bodymapping stories of women living with HIV/AIDS, Border Crossings

For academic writing see Research Gate - for diverse publications e.g. The Lancet Countdown, The Journal of Climate Change and Health, BMJ Open