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Call for Book Chapters
Mapping the Environmental Humanities: The Emerging Role of GIS in Ecocriticism
Issues related to the global environment, planetary health, and the related survival of all species,
including humans, represent fields of study that are urgently pursued by scientists, scholars, and
policymakers alike as we try to make sense of and find solutions to the present and future impacts of climate change. One of the more recent scholarly endeavours involves the mapping technologies of Geographic Information Systems and how they are being used to study and interpret environmental data and texts. It is at this intersection of the Spatial Humanities and the Environmental Humanities that a new book will focus current scholarship on how to use these geomedia projects for an enhanced methodology of study of a global issue that impacts on all of us.
The Environment and Society series of Lexington Books, a division of the Rowman and Littlefield
Publishing Group, is proposing a book of papers related to this subject and is seeking chapter
contributions from scholars currently working in this field.
Please see details below for this Call for Book Chapters:
Title
Mapping the Environmental Humanities: The Emerging Role of GIS in Ecocriticism.
Editors
Mark Terry PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, Faculty of
Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Michael Hewson PhD, Senior Lecturer Environmental Geography, School of Education and the Arts, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton Australia.
Scope
This book explores the latest scholarship in this emerging field of study with leading theorists and
practitioners who are blazing new trails in the relationship between GIS technologies and the
Environmental Humanities.
Rationale
Geographic Information Systems are fast becoming new platforms of geomedia expression for the
study and analysis of global issues examined by the Environmental Humanities. As a means of
curating data in multimedia forms, GIS provides the scholar with a global representation of this
information in ways that afford geo-relational study. By comparing these data with locative media
tools such as GIS new data emerges, data that sheds new light on environmental issues common to experiences in different parts of the world.
The discovery of relationships between historical events, human behaviour, climate shifts, social,
economic and cultural adaptations and evolutions makes GIS a valuable geospatial tool of study in the Environmental Humanities. The digital affordances of Big Data, map animations, multimedia,
weblinks, artefact archiving can all be situated specifically to their points of origin or areas of study to provide an enhanced perspective as well as a new framework for environmental investigations.
If the ‘super-power’ of humanities is ‘story-telling’, a convenient question is – how useful has digital
mapping technology been to the story? Maps are helpful in the finding of ‘place’. And the connection to ‘place’ is foundational to well-being, because sociologically, and for some (particularly First Nations), physiologically attached to place is history, and language, and art, and culture. It is useful then to pause – and more broadly, review and re-envisage; how have digital maps helped in the pursuit of critical thinking and reflective culture? Further, what could be the emerging directions at the nexus of spatial science and spatial humanities?
Target Audience
Ever since Gerardus Mercator, maps have directed, enthused, informed and engaged imagination.
Those same characteristics have latterly driven the use of digital mapping in fields far beyond the
imagination of technology designers. Arguably the sciences and humanities have never more clearly embraced. The book shares the scholarly experience and the ‘state-of-play’ of the role of maps in the creative arts and humanities.
This book will appear in the Environment and Society book series, published by Lexington Books, an imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Recommended Topics
• How could transmedia projects incorporate environmental research and GIS platforms?
• Has GIS been useful to First Nation peoples in charting culture, claims and Country?
• Does GIS have a place in ecocinema, and what might cinematic cartography look like: How
can ecocinema (both fiction and non-fiction) effectively incorporate GIS in its story-telling
methods?
• How can ecofeminism use GIS to inform or destabilize conventional ecocritical concepts?
• What are the ways in which the Spatial Humanities and the Environmental Humanities
combine to enhance policy-based climate research?
• Can GIS practices be used to reduce and eliminate spatial injustices in global communities
among indigenous, remote, and impoverished communities?
• How does GIS reveal new data between rural and urban environments to inform the social
sciences?
• How has (and can) GIS be used to study the environmental challenges facing the planet from
macro and micro socio-economic and socio-geographic perspectives?
• How can the measurement of time and space be used to influence human behaviour and
environmental policy?
• How is environmental science data read differently when studied through the lens of GIS
technologies?
• What artistic approaches to using GIS as a canvas to tell environmental stories are currently in
use and proposed: the Geo-Doc, multimedia GIS, interactive and animated maps, deep layering, text- and hypertext-rich pins?
Submissions
Please send your proposals by June 15, 2020, to the editors listed below:
1. Mark Terry, York University, Toronto, Canada: terrma@yorku.ca
2. Michael Hewson, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Australia: m.hewson@cqu.edu.au
Posted on April 14, 2020
