Scott Kirsch

Cultural geography I Materialist turns

A series of ‘cultural turns’ across human geography have left cultural geography itself with something of an identity crisis. I suggest that overlapping strains of materialism are already providing cultural geography with some of its ‘connective wiring’ and core concerns. Common materialist sensibilities are evident in recent theoretically and empirically engaged work on value and waste, which highlights the transformative work of meaning-making cultural processes in the world. Close contextual engagements with waste have offered geographers an ‘enhanced’ means of grounding their materialisms by turning to processes occurring at the bottom of the value chain. Waste has also provided a window onto the contested cultural work of coding things for value, and the research has served to accentuate an engagement with materiality as transformation and process.

John Wesley Powell and the Mapping of the Colorado Plateau, 1869 –1879: Survey Science, Geographical Solutions, and the Economy of Environmental Values

In 1869, John Wesley Powell led an expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon, the last “great blank space” on the map of the continental U.S. In the work of filling in the continental map, Powell and others in an emerging community of government scientists in Washington anticipated a new set of concerns over productivity, order, and the limits of natural resources—including land itself—in the arid lands of the West. This article examines the historical geographical processes through which Powell’s maps of an unexplored region gave way, in roughly a decade, to his maps of proper land use, epitomized by his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which is still conventionally recognized as a foundational piece in American environmental thought. Focusing on the work of the Powell Survey (1869 – 1879), as well as Powell’s lesser–known work as a special commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1873 – 1874), the article situates the maps, censuses, and expert advice produced during Powell’s early career as part of a wider traffic of knowledge linking Washington to the western territories. The article develops a broadly materialist geographical analysis to explore how the production of knowledge about people and place on the Colorado Plateau articulated with the westward geographical expansion of systems of value and signification. It thus raises questions about the relations between environmental values, on the one hand, and the scientific and political work of valuing environments, on the other.

Cultural geography II Cultures of nature (and technology)

Recent cultural geographic research, located at a variety of settings (laboratory, clinic, battlefield, container port), has emphasized culture’s productive dimensions through studies of the linked construction of nature, culture, and technologies. In this second of three reports, I examine a range of scholarship that asks in different ways what it means to be formative in the production of nature, and I discuss the implications of recent efforts to rethink culture as a form of productivity. Some of this formative cultural work is scientific and intellectual, and geographers have sought to understand the practices of scientists, medical researchers, folklorists, and others engaged in the work of producing new objects of nature, culture, and the human body. Their work suggests that science and other modern forms of expertise perform a peculiar kind of cultural work in the production of nature, carving out and occupying positions of privileged, albeit still contested, ontological actors. I also note recent efforts to reconceptualize broad categories of space, surface, and ‘land’ around similarly generative cultures of knowledge and innovation, reflecting related ontological concerns for engaging with culture, ‘culturing’, and cultivation as productive processes. I argue that questions of technology remain inseparably tied to constructions of nature, and that technology still has much to disclose in terms of its cultural geographies.

Teaching the history of geography: Current challenges and future directions

Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a device for cohort building and professionalization, and as a means of interrogating the disciplinary present – but also how it is challenged by neoliberal educational policies, competing priorities in curriculum design, and sub-disciplinary divisions.

Ecologists and the experimental landscape: the nature of science at the US Department of Energy's Savannah River Site

Although ecological conceptions of nature remain among the most authoritative in the world today, cultural geographers of landscape have paid little attention to the continuing salience of landscape as an object and scale of analysis in landscape and ecosystems ecology. That this object — a naturalized landscape of dynamic and multi-scalar systems and flows, not fixity — has been constructed, disproportionately, from some of the most technological of spaces, compels us to look more closely at the ways that specific natures circulate to inform general principles and ideas. This article explores how ecologists and other environmental scientists have turned the buffer zone surrounding the US Department of Energys Savannah River Site, a former plutonium and tritium production plant, into an experimental landscape, with all the proprietary qualities embodied in the latter term. The study brings together a genealogy of the site as a space for scientific ecology with interviews conducted with contemporary environmental scientists based there, focusing chiefly on the work of scientists at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. By investigating the nature of agency, institution building, and representational practices in the making of an experimental, ecological landscape, the article also raises questions about how, at the Savannah River Site and elsewhere, the work of environmental science relates to the productive processes going on around it.

Harold knapp and the geography of normal controversy: Radioiodine in the historical environment

In 1962, after high levels of the isotope Iodine-131 were detected in Utah milk supplies, Dr. Harold Knapp, a mathematician working for the AECs Division of Biology and Medicine, developed a new model for estimating, first, the relation between a single deposition of radioactive fallout on pasturage and the levels of Iodine-131 in fresh milk and, second, the total dose to human thyroids resulting from daily intake of the contaminated milk. The implications of Knapps findings were enormous. They suggested that short-living radioiodine, rather than long-living nuclides such as radiostrontium, posed the greatest hazard from nuclear test fallout and that children raised in Nevada and Utah during the 1950s had been exposed to internal radiation doses far in excess of recommended guidelines. This paper explores the explicit historical revisionism of Knapps study, his refusal, contra normal AEC practices of knowledge production and spatial representation, to distance himself from the people and places downwind from the Nevada Test Site, and the reactions his work provoked among his AEC colleagues.

Cultural geography III: Objects of culture and humanity, or, re-‘thinging’ the Anthropocene landscape

Unless they are to suddenly evaporate, material objects, endowed with varying capacities to move through the ages, are matters of time as well as of space. Long-term perspectives – from the historical to the geological – have been engaged by cultural geographers as a means of shedding light on linked discursive and material transformations, offering useful vantage points on the temporalities of human (and inhuman) existence through the existence of ‘things’. In this third and final report, I identify confluences of research taking shape around two distinct kinds of ‘scenes’ which embody a range of approaches to problems of culture and materialism: the naming of the Anthropocene; and the persistence of landscape as a spatial model for ‘holding things together’. Calling attention to the intermingled quality of materiality with immaterial ‘things’ and temporal dynamics, the review highlights the persistent need for cultural analysis of complex and contested social worlds, and emphasizes the value of cultural geographic research in addressing problems of human subjectivity at a moment when the distinctly human can no longer be taken for granted.

Spatial Analysis of Childhood Cancer Incidence and Electric Power Line Location in Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee

Extremely low frequency electromagnetic radiation emitted from electric transmission and distribution lines has been suspected as a possible agent in cancer induction and promotion, especially leukemia and brain cancers in children. This paper examines spatial relationships among childhood leukemia and brain cancer incidence, cancer victims residences, and electric power line location in Shelby County, Tennessee, using the methods of locational analysis and spatial autocorrelation. Results of these analyses implied that childhood leukemia and brain cancer incidence in Memphis and Shelby County exhibits a nonrandom spatial pattern which may be influenced by factors of urban morphology, including proximity of cancer victims residences to electrical distribution lines. Leukemia and brain cancer mortality for the population as a whole was also shown to exist in a nonrandom, clustered pattern at the census tract level; however, it could not be conclusively established that electric power lines influenced this pattern.

Historical-Geographical Materialism

Historical-geographical materialism describes the intellectual project of creating a Marxist science of geography and, simultaneously, of infusing the broader currents of historical and dialectical materialism with explicitly geographical concepts and sensibilities. This article examines the emergence of historical-geographical materialism and its roots in materialist thought, focusing, with particular reference to the seminal work of David Harvey, on the dialectic of labor and nature as well as the production and use of geographical knowledges in capitalist societies. The philosophical premises of materialism are explored, along with Marxs development of historical materialism as a method for the analysis and critique of both idealist philosophy and political economy. The political implications of historical materialism and, in turn, historical-geographical materialism, are also discussed in connection with the rejection of scientific neutrality. It is suggested that historical-geographical materialism today is not characterized by a singular conceptual agenda but rather is reflected in a diversity of Marxist approaches to understanding the geography of production and social reproduction.

Book review essay: A catalog of things

Things bring people together, Bruno Latour argues in his introduction to this weighty, genre-bending volume, because they divide us. The implications of this move—moving things, in this relational capacity, to the center of political ontology—are explored in the following thousand, exquisitely illustrated pages. Comprised of more than 150 original contributions, installation photographs, literary excerpts and reproduced objets d’art, Making Things Public is the companion volume and archive to the editors’ 2005 ZKM Center for Art and Media exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany. Part exhibition catalog, part scholarly text; a targeted public intervention about public interventions; and a collaborative megaproject by a relatively wide range of scholars, artists, engineers, architects, and scientists, among others, the book is a magnificent, extended experiment. Though it is difficult to gauge what the shelf life of the volume will be in any of its sweeping interventions—the arts and sciences, technology, democracy, public life—our premise is that it would be worthwhile to dwell on some of its achievements and, as a modest collaboration of our own, to speak to key issues and questions raised across chapters and sections of the volume as a whole. Latour’s introduction is Herculean in the relative ease of its conceptual heavy lifting. Its purpose is to open theoretical possibilities for understanding a world of dingpolitik, a world wherein issues create publics, objects trump ideology, and ‘things’ or ‘matters of concern’ effectively tie those worlds together. Readers of Latour’s recent work will be broadly familiar with the language of dingpolitik. It is not the lifeless objects that ‘things’ have become that are of primary interest, that is, the inert matter apparently removed from the political sphere, but a relational sense of things and their politics that are of interest: the Heideggerian ding, the res in res publica, the pragmata of American pragmatist philosophy and, for Latour and his colleagues, the emerging issues which produce their own relations and entanglements. These theoretical threads are not always seamlessly woven together—how could they be?—but Latour and co-editor Peter Weibel, Director of the ZKM, have managed to put together a rather coherent text around the question, ‘what would an object-oriented democracy look like?’ And as scores of contributors ask, perhaps more interestingly, throughout the volume, what forms of object-oriented democracy already exist, or have existed historically? Examples abound. Good Governments and Phantom Publics; Demonstrations, Circulations, Public Experiments and Virtual Laboratories; Water Parliaments, Fashion Parliaments, Pneumatic Parliaments, the Parliamentary Public; Making Electrons Public, Making Science and Technology Results Public, and Making Coastal Environments Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 11, No. 2, March 2010