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Mapping and the Environmental Imaginary: History, Literature and Politics

Module description

This module brings together methodologies from landscape and environmental history, literature and literary eco-criticism, engaged fieldwork, cultural studies and urban geography, in order to explore practices of living in times of environmental and planetary uncertainty.

Students will gain experience of interpreting historical and literary map evidence as representations of real and imagined worlds since the medieval period. You will trace the interactions of cartography, political discourse and colonialism across time and space, while also examining the complex entanglements of local and global practices. You will study how relational inequalities have been created and sustained, focusing on how environments and resources have been mapped, read, represented and exploited over time. You will consider maps in their relation to environmental change through human and other-than-human interactions of earth, water, time, animate life, and more. We will explore together the possibility of creating alternative maps that engage with, and give historical context to, the urgent environmental issues of our time.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The module aims to introduce the main themes, theories and discussion in current environmental humanities research, by focusing on the intentions, practices and outcomes (environmental, cultural and political) of the uneven and contested processes of map making and map reading. You will gain experience of interpreting a wide range of historical, literary, archival and digital maps including, medieval world maps, colonial estate maps, geological surveys, literary maps, resistance maps, pollution maps.

This module aims to address the following questions:

• How can a focus on historical and literary map-making and on the eco-politics of map production help us to rethink our assumptions about the past, present (and future) of environmental change?
• How can attention to mapping as knowledge production help to challenge the colonial rationalist binaries of dis/order, dis/orientation, the un/mapped, the un/civilized and the un/known in this moment of planetary precarity?  
• What is the function of exploring mapping alongside resource and energy related writing, including fiction, history, and creative non-fiction, and other cultural texts such as documentaries, fictions, installation art, poetry, interactive websites, photography? How can we use these materials to reconfigure environmental debates connected to postcoloniality, globalization and the capitalist world-system? 

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Express a broad historical, literary and political knowledge and understanding of the meanings of maps and processes of map-making from the medieval period to today.
• 2. Engage with independent ideas and explain the role of maps in representing and narrativizing landscape and environmental change over time
• 3. Demonstrate an interdisciplinary understanding of environmental humanities research and a critical understanding of the use of visual culture and maps specifically.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Analyse and reflect creatively upon maps, in relation to environmental humanities research, across temporal and geographical contexts.
• 5. Engage critically with a variety of different disciplinary practices in their relationship to maps, mapping and environmental issues.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Deploy persuasive communication skills both independently and in group work
• 7. Mobilise effective research skills to critically analyse primary and secondary material on the module themes and issues.
• 8. To work independently and to module deadlines

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Maps in history (e.g. from medieval world maps to modern parish maps).
• Mapping in literature (e.g. from psychogeography to indigenous contemporary literature)
• Mapping landscapes (e.g. English estate maps, colonial imaginaries, property, boundaries, land use, cultivation).
• Mapping wilderness (e.g. colonial mapping, emptied space).
• Mapping energy (e.g. past/present, visible/invisible energy landscapes: wind, water, coal, oil, gas, nuclear). Mapping underground (e.g. the geo-political and colonial contexts to mining underground, extraction, pollution, environmental devastation).
• Resistance maps (e.g. indigenous knowledge, historical memory, land rights).
• Mapping in the field/mapping workshop
• Mapping regeneration (e.g. mapping wastelands, post-industrial and contaminated space, the visual politics of neglect).
• Mapping displacement and identity (e.g. home, place, belonging, migration, diaspora, memory).
• Mapping worlds otherwise (e.g. how can past and present maps be used to envisage different futures, as part of alternative thinking about life on a damaged planet).

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading:

• J.B. Harley The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (2001)
• Alexander Kent et al. Mapping empires : colonial cartographies of land and sea (2020)
• Lee Roberts ‘Deep Mapping’ Humanities Special Issue 5:1 2016
• Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English maps : a history (1999).
• David Buisseret Rural Images: Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds (1996)
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005)
• Guy Debord, Guide Pychogéographique de Paris (1957)
• J.R. Carpenter, ‘Mapping Place, Troubling Space’, The Digital Review (2020)
• Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (2013)
• Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004)
• W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (1995)
• Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001)
• Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014)

Film

• Grant Gee, Patience: After Sebald (2012)
• Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space (1997)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

•  ELE
• https://feralatlas.org/
• https://www.queeringthemap.com/
• https://mappingcreativerecovery.org/
• https://luckysoap.com/apictureofwind/
• http://thegroundistandon.com/
• https://www.commonground.org.uk

Key words search

Maps, mapping, history, literature, landscape, environment, space, decolonisation, environmental humanities