Speculative fabulation : researching worlds to come in Antarctica

Antarctica has been imagined and fantasized for millennia, yet it has remained – until now – off-limits to the ethnographic imagination. In this chapter I reflect on a specific aspect of my on-going research and many years of short-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Antarctic Peninsula: the making of the documentary film Nightfall on Gaia1 (2015), which, I argue, illustrates a creative approach to researching futures anthropologically and engaging with an anthropology of extreme environments. An overarching aim of my research endeavour in the Antarctic has been to better understand how humans are learning to live on the Ice. That is, how humans have come to inhabit an extreme environment that was almost completely out-of-bounds as recently as little more than 100 years ago.