Since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Arctic (understood here as the circumpolar region around and north of the Arctic Circle) has entered worldwide public discussion to an unprecedented extent. As a global climate archive and the site of various scrambles for resources, it has become the centre of attention within debates on climate change and global geopolitics. The international stir created by the planting of a Russian flag under the Arctic sea ice in 2007 and a Chinese flag at the North Pole in 2012, the politicisation of the recovery of the two shipwrecks from John Franklin’s disastrous 1845 expedition in 2014 and 2016, and Donald Trump’s controversial overturning of Barack Obama’s ban on oil drilling in the Arctic are spectacular examples of this new hypervisibility of the Arctic in international politics and global media.

Organised by the members and collaborators of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project, which is based at Tampere University and funded by the Academy of Finland, this international conference responds to the recent global interest in the Arctic. How geography is mediated and imagined matters profoundly: there is a world of difference between the figuration of ice as a sublime backdrop in Jeff Orlowski’s climate change documentary Chasing Ice (2011) and the presentation of ice and snow as a life-sustaining sphere in Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold (2015). We invite reflections on the role of art and the imagination in shaping, transforming, and contesting ideas about geography, and on the social, political, and environmental consequences of these mediations.