Geography
Fall/Winter 2018
Geography, Environmental Studies & Urban Studies
Jacket image forthcoming
The Invention of Rivers
Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent Dilip da Cunha
Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture October 2018 352pp 170 illus. 9780812249996 £46.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Dilip da Cunha integrates history, art, cultural studies, hydrology, and geography to tell the story of how rivers have been culturally constructed as lines granted a special role in defining human habitation and everyday practice. While da Cunha's vision of rivers is a global one, he takes an especially close look at the Ganges, as he traces the ways in which it has been pictured, mapped, surveyed, explored, and measured across the millennia. He argues that the articulation of the river Ganges has placed it at odds with Ganga, a "rain terrain" that does not conform to the line of separation, containment, and calibration that are the formalities of a river landscape. By calling rivers into question, da Cunha depicts an ecosystem that is neither land nor water but one of ubiquitous wetness in which rain is held in soil, aquifers, glaciers, snowfields, building materials, agricultural fields, air, and even plants and animals. Printed in full color and featuring more than 150 illustrations, The Invention of Rivers proposes rain, or "the rainscape," as an alternative starting point for imagining, understanding, and designing human habitation.
The New Arab Urban
Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress Edited by Harvey Molotch & Davide Ponzini
February 2019 368pp 9781479897254 £22.99 PB 9781479880010 £68.00 HB NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Shining special light on Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—where the dynamics of extreme urbanization are so strongly evident—the authors of The New Arab Urban trace what happens when money is plentiful, regulation weak, and labor conditions severe. Just how do authorities in such settings reconcile goals of oft-claimed civic betterment with hypersegregation and radical inequality? How do they align cosmopolitan sensibilities with authoritarian rule? How do these elite custodians arrange tactical alliances to protect particular forms of social stratification and political control? What sense can be made of their massive investment for environmental breakthrough in the midst of world-class ecological mayhem? To address such questions, this book’s contributors place the new Arab urban in wider contexts of trade, technology, and design. Drawn from across disciplines and diverse home countries, they investigate how these cities import projects, plans and structures from the outside, but also how, increasingly, Gulf-originated initiatives disseminate to cities far afield.
Affective Ecocriticism
Emotion, Embodiment, Environment Edited by Kyle Bladow & Jennifer Ladino
November 2018 342pp 9 photos, index 9781496207562 £26.99 PB 9781496206794 £46.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant volume imagines a more affective—and consequently more effective—ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies. These essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness— all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism.
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Caring for Glaciers
Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas Karine Gagné January 2019 264pp 19 b&w illus., 2 maps 9780295744001 £22.99 PB 9780295744018 £69.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led to social fragmentation, the growing isolation of elders, and ethical dilemmas for those who strive to maintain traditional subsistence activities. Simultaneously, climate change is causing glaciers - a vital source of life in the region - to recede, which elders perceive as the consequence of a broken bond with the natural environment and the deities that inhabit the landscape. Caring for Glaciers looks at the causes and consequences of ongoing social and cultural change in peoples’ relationship with the natural environment. It illuminates how relations of reciprocity - learned through everyday life and work in the mountains with the animals, glaciers, and deities that form Ladakh’s sacred geography - shape and nurture an ethics of care.