In the 2017 HSS Distinguished Lecture, Sverker Sörlin described the Northern Turn in the history of science; a wave of recent histories examining knowledge-making in the Arctic. Expanding this Northern Turn, the papers in this session explore ways of telling “other” histories of cold places. Cryo, meaning “cold,” invokes the high latitude and high altitude geographies under consideration, long caricatured as extra- or a-historical spaces. Telling cryo-histories means taking seriously the historicity of such places, telling stories in which cultural geographies and contingent histories meet in the production of knowledge and place. Such stories are timely. 2018 marks the 200th year since Mary Shelley conjured the image of an otherworldly frozen land, banishing Frankenstein’s monster to an arctic imagined outside the natural and political order. 2018 also marks twenty-five years since historians began analyzing the ways that science in frozen lands generates “others,” including work from Lisa Bloom (Gender on Ice, 1993); Trevor Levere (Science and the Canadian Arctic,1993), and Michael Bravo, (“The Accuracy of Ethnoscience…, 1996). These histories examined how frozen landscapes and their denizens were figured as “others” against ideas of Euro-American imperialisms, nationalisms, heroic masculinity, and metropolitanism. This session explores the continuing possibilities and limits in “other" cryo-histories of science a quarter-century later. Playing with familiar categories – wilderness; laboratory-field dichotomy; heroism; Western science; Indigenous knowledge – we consider not just other stories but how we tell them, thinking afresh about the conceptual tools historians deploy in histories of polar and alpine science.
