01 November 2009
The proposal to establish a SCAR Social Science Action Group submitted by Dr. Daniela Haase Liggett and Dr. Gary Steel has recently been approved by the SCAR Executive Committee. This decision opens a range of new opportunities for APECS members and the wider Antarctic social science community.
The Social Science Action Group will facilitate an in-depth discussion on the topic "Values in Antarctica (VIA): Human Connections to a Continent". To date, there has been no co-ordinated effort to document the multiple values that Antarctica may hold. It is the primary objective of this action group to accomplish this task. The Social Science Action Group shall focus on cataloguing the range of values human beings place on Antarctica. This includes both intrinsic values (such as symbolic and spiritual) and extrinsic values (such as economic and scientific). A secondary objective will be explaining the importance of each value, or category of values, with respect to SCAR’s mission.
The group members will be expected to contribute insights from their fields of study. Findings from existing academic literature will be summarized. It is expected that this analysis and summary by the action group will generate new research in the wider social science community. To this end, a meta-database of social-science and humanities research projects that are significant for an assessment of Antarctic values is to be created by the group.
