Undergraduate Course: Mapping Nature, Territories and Cross-Cultural Encounter (HIST10447)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course is a critical introduction to some major themes of cultural and historical geography. It will examine the geographical/geological knowledge production and discourses, focusing on the nineteenth and twenty-century history of science. |
| Course description |
Maps "are narratives with a purpose, stories with an agenda. They contain silences as well as articulations, secrets as well as knowledge, lies as well as truth" (John Rennie Short 2003, 24). They are visual, yet less visible and less obvious instruments of power, objects and agents of cultural and political discourses and knowledge production at the same time. The same applies to geography and geology as such. The geographical mapping of natural resources and pathogenic regions in colonial India or searching for a solution to the so-called "Jewish demographical question" in the interwar period Europe weren't simply reactions to physical and spatial-ethnic realities. That reflected rather the active engagement of geographers and geographical experts in constructing those realities, boundaries and objects to be depicted.
This course explores the role that historical geography and geology played in the formation of the cultural, political and spatial production of nature, nations, states, ethical and racial discourses, narratives of exploration and possession, environmental transformation as well as colonial/imperial and postcolonial power relations and global entanglements. We are going to examine these broad themes through cultural texts and place-specific cases, focusing roughly on the 19th and 20th centuries and moving across the world, from colonial Africa to India and continental Europe.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | A pass or passes in 40 credits of first level historical courses or equivalent and a pass or passes in 40 credits of second level historical courses or equivalent.
Before enrolling students on this course, Personal Tutors are asked to contact the History Honours Admission Administrator to ensure that a place is available (Tel: 504030)
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students must have 3 History courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses. Enrolments for this course are managed by the CAHSS Visiting Student Office, in line with the quotas allocated by the department. All enquiries to enrol must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. It is not appropriate for students to contact the department directly to request additional spaces.
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| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrate a detailed and critical understanding of the themes of the course in particular and the historical narratives in the history of knowledge and technology in general;
- demonstrate the ability to understand and apply specialised research and methodological skills considered in the course and to develop a strong grasp of complex subjects through directed reading;
- demonstrate, in the final essay and through oral contributions, the ability to develop critical and independent argumentation and a sustained and effective analysis of a difficult research problem;
- demonstrate intellectual maturity and autonomy, and the ability to formulate appropriate questions and conclusions;
- demonstrate the ability to understand the changing relationship between science and the wider society and the awareness of the societal, political and cultural power of subtle technic of knowledge production.
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Reading List
Clayton, D.: Colonizing, Settling, and the Origins of Academic Geography. In: The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography (2011), 50-70.
Danielsson, S.K.; Jacob, Frank: War and Geography. The Spatiality of Organised Mass Violence, Paderborn 2017.
Driver, F.: Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford 2001.
Hannah, M.G.: Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America, Cambridge 2000.
Hansen, J.D.: Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848-1914, Oxford 2015.
Howkins, A.: The Polar Regions. An Environmental History, Cambridge 2016.
Navickas, K.: Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789-1848, Manchester 2016.
Seegel, S.: Map Men. Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe, Chicago 2018.
Solnit, R.: The Annihilation of Time and Space. In: New England Review, 24 (2003) 1, 5-19.
Rankin, W.: After the Map. Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, Chicago 2016.
Roller, H.: Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil, 2014.
Turchetti, S.; Roberts, P. (eds.): The Surveillance Imperative. Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond, New York 2014. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Justyna Turkowska
Tel:
Email: jturkows@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Lorna Berridge
Tel:
Email: Lorna.Berridge@ed.ac.uk |
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