Bipolar is a new interdisciplinary polar archive created for International Polar Year 2007-08. It is published in conjunction with a symposium held at the British Library in November 2007, which brought together leading artists, scholars, scientists and thinkers to explore how our knowledge of the Polar Regions is constructed and how it can be enriched.

The book features essays from the renowned geographer Denis Cosgrove and cultural critic Kathryn Yusoff, and over 30 ‘archives’ contributed by the symposium participants that investigate various records — visual, personal, historical, chemical, biological — that can enrich and extend our engagement with the Polar Regions and their effect on global environments.

The collection investigates how archives place demands on us to think about what is vital in that knowledge—vital to our present work and to the work to come—the basis on which we remake worlds.

With the Polar Regions under increasing pressure due to climate change, both environmentally and geopolitically, these archives assume their most potent role as the basis on which we imagine and shape the futures of both polar and global spaces.