Science and culture in the Kerguelen Islands: a relational approach to the spatial formation of a subantarctic archipelago

Science and culture in the Kerguelen Islands: a relational approach to the spatial formation of a subantarctic archipelago

Blog Article

The Kerguelen Power Supply Islands are devoid of a permanent population, but are nonetheless interlinked to past and current human activities that have shaped their subantarctic landscape.In the past decades, the archipelago has become a French outpost for scientific research where scientists, support staff, research assistants, and travelers assemble during temporary missions.In this article, I present the spatial formation of islands as relational in order to explore how the material and the cultural converge to make the Kerguelen Islands a place of both mundane practice and global interconnection.

These spatialities intertwine the features of the landscape with pre-departure preparations, animal encounters, scientific rigour, daily routines, and past human activities.I advance these narratives by analyzing 18 blogs of French sojourners who have spent extensive time on the Kerguelen Islands.I ultimately give islands without a permanent population a character unlike that of isolation and contemplation as is usually attributed to Charcoal Supplements cold-water islands of the (sub) polar seas.