International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

established during IPY produced new alignments
with colleagues in the natural and physical sciences
that will become instrumental in the years ahead. Last
but not least, social science issues are taking much
higher profile among the next generation of polar
researchers represented by APECS (Chapter 4.3), which
now has its Law and Policy working group and a social
sciences disciplinary coordinator, not to mention that
the last and the current APECS President (as of 2010)
have been social scientists.
We believe that the IPY 2007–2008 also has
broader repercussions beyond the field of polar
research, namely as a successful attempt at ‘remaking’
science (or ‘re-thinking science – Gibbons et al.,
1994; Nowotny et al., 2001) particularly, by building a
grassroots trans-disciplinary program via bottom-up
and open collaboration among academic scientists
and many new stakeholders that had little or no voice
in earlier research (Chapter 5.4). Another key IPY legacy
Fig. 2.10-12. Ole Henrik Magga, former
President of the Sámediggi (Sami
parliament) and one of the leaders of
the EALÁT project (no. 399) delivers
plenary talk “Arctic peoples and Arctic
research - success stories, contradictions
and mutual expectations” at the Oslo
Science Conference, June 10, 2010
(Photo: Igor Krupnik).
is the legitimization of the ‘two ways of knowing’ (cf.
Barber and Barber, 2007) or rather, of the many ‘ways
of knowing’ of polar regions and processes, including
those advanced by physical and biological scientists,
polar residents, social and humanities researchers,
but also increasingly by educators, artists and media.
The door to those many ‘ways of knowing’ was,
again, opened by the inclusion of the new ‘others’ to
the PY, primarily by the inclusion of social sciences,
humanities, and polar residents’ agendas into its
program, and also by the outstanding success of
public and outreach activities in the fourth IPY.
This leads to other crucial legacies of the social sciences’
and humanities’ participation in IPY 2007–2008,
namely, the more complex vision of the polar regions
and processes, and the recognition that the ‘human
dimension’ paradigm is too limiting. The latter
term was originally coined in the wildlife and natural
park management in the 1940s and was propelled to
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