Antarctique et espace : fin et suite de la géographie

Grevsmühl, Sebastian

doi:10.3917/lig.742.0115

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Cosgrove ). Whereas the mountains functioned all along the nineteenth century as one of these privileged sites for observing the global environment (think for instance of the well known analogy between altitude and latitude), they have given way during the twentieth century to new geographies where the tropics and the polar regions play henceforth the role of ‘benchmark regions’ of global environmental change (Grevsmühl , ).…”

Section: Three Theses For Furthering Interdisciplinary Inquiry Into Gmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

Grevsmühl

2016

Geography and Environment

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Global environmental images have become part of our everyday life experience. We encounter them in news reports, scientific articles and artistic interventions. Yet so far, only the most iconic of these images have received close critical attention from scholars coming mostly from two related fields, science studies and cultural geography. Some of those studies, as for instance research carried out on the famous Apollo photographs, have revealed that the icons of our environmental age do not provide simple readings, that they carry multiple, often contradicting messages, and that they can be vectors of highly ambiguous and even conflicting political beliefs. However, historically informed interdisciplinary research on visual cultures from an environmental perspective is still at its beginning. This essay thus calls for a systematic exploration of the crucial role the visual plays in the creation, circulation, interpretation and adaptation of global environmental knowledge. It is argued that this inquiry cannot be left solely to historians or geographers but calls for a truly interdisciplinary engagement. One central claim is that we need to better understand the constitutive role the visual and associated knowledge practices, conventions and infrastructures play in mediating global environmental phenomena. One possibility, it is argued, is to develop a broader historical framework for understanding how the visual actively shaped scientific and environmental discourse, and how it stimulated the rise of holistic and dynamic understandings of the environment from the nineteenth century onwards. A second important research area that is suggested concerns the crucial role global environmental images play at the interface of science discourse and environmental policy and governance. The essay concludes by suggesting three basic theses which seem particularly promising for future interdisciplinary inquiries into global environmental images.

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Section: Three Theses For Furthering Interdisciplinary Inquiry Into Gmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

Grevsmühl

2016

Geography and Environment

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“…It first relies on a visual construction. Just as in the case of continents (for Antarctica, see Grevsmühl ), the image of the global ocean is not a description from a realistic (mimetic) point of view but it is a logical construction derived from the observations of so‐called laws of nature. A recent and widely recognised important book is Vanney's Géographie de l'Océan Global ().…”

Section: The Importance Of Images In the Slow Building Of A Global Oceanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coastal landscape as part of a global ocean: two shifts

Regnauld

Limido

2016

Geography and Environment

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Oceans and seas have long been considered as distinct areas, different from one another. At the end of the eighteenth century the idea began to appear (among romantic painters and poets) that they all formed a single space that would be a 'global ocean'. Humboldt was the first scientist to take this idea seriously and to study oceans as a 'whole'. He drew the first map (with isotherms) which could explain why oceans had to be understood as a global climatic machine. Since then the global behaviour of the ocean has become an undisputed scientific fact and many artists have produced paintings which 'represent' this state of knowledge. During the same period the coast lines were not considered as a global scientific object but as a discrete series of sites, all different from one another. Tourism was partly responsible for this division of coasts as each tourist place had to show it was unique and worth being visited. Many painters helped to highlight certain sites (Hudson River, Normandy, south coast of England). Then, at the end of the twentieth century some new equations dealing with sea level allowed the idea there was something like a global coastline, responding to a global climatic forcing. Few artists today tend to work with this global idea of local coasts but some of them, taking part in scientific cruises or fieldwork, do produce a new type of image for a global coastline.

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Antarctique et espace : fin et suite de la géographie

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

Coastal landscape as part of a global ocean: two shifts

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