Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen
Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen is a senior lecturer in Antarctic law and governance at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. In addition to her Antarctic research, she has spent five seasons working in Antarctica as a polar tourism guide.
Hanne was recognised as an emerging research leader as the first HASS-based researcher to be awarded a Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Fellowship in 2017. She is a past President (2017-18) of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the SCAR Standing Committee on Humanities and Social Sciences (SC-HASS).
Dr Hanne Nielsen
Antarctica is, and has always been, very much "for sale." Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavors. Their lectures, narratives, photographs, and films were essentially advertisements for their adventures. At the same time, popular media began to use the newly encountered continent to draw attention to commercial products. These advertisements both trace the commercialization of Antarctica and reveal how commercial settings have shaped the dominant imaginaries of the place.
By contextualizing and analyzing Antarctic advertisements from the late nineteenth century to the present, Brand Antarctica identifies five key framings of the South Polar continent: a place for heroes, a place of extremity, a place of purity, a place to protect, and a place that transforms. Demonstrating how these conceptual framings of Antarctica in turn circulate through our culture, Hanne Elliot Fonss Nielsen challenges common assumptions about Antarctica's past and present, encouraging readers to rethink their own relationship with the Far South.