Tag: Editor article

Meet the Editors – Interview with Andrew Whitehouse, co-editor of Landscapes beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

Landscapes beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives, edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, and Andrew Whitehouse has recently been released as part of the EASA series. Here Andrew Whitehouse takes us behind the makings of the volume and shares how through his involvement he overcame his own skepticism for the usefulness of landscape as an idea in anthropology.

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1. What drew you to the study of how landscapes are constituted and recollected?
We were initially encouraged by getting some funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council to run a series of workshops on the theme of landscape. The four of us (myself, Jo Vergunst, Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Arnason) were all interested in environmental anthropology and we were keen to see how different anthropologists were thinking about landscapes. Nicolas is from France and one of our aims was to compare French and British approaches. This really came to the fore when we had a workshop in Paris. We also wanted to see how ethnographic writing about landscape could draw together different elements, from very direct perception to large scale and long-term structural dimensions.

2. What aspect of writing or assembling this work did you find most difficult?
Probably just the sheer task of communicating with all of the different people who have been involved in the book. That’s one of the challenges of an edited volume, I guess. Sometimes there were different perspectives within the editorial team, but in many ways we wanted the book to reflect different ideas about landscape, so that wasn’t a problem.

3. How did your perceptions of the book’s topic change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?
I definitely learnt a lot about landscape! When we began the series of workshops on which the book was based, I’ll confess to being a bit skeptical about the usefulness of landscape as an idea in anthropology. I thought it was a problem that it had so much baggage and that it lacked precision. I’ve come to rather like that baggage though, because it tends to take things in an interesting direction. I love the way that landscape seems to encourage us to draw nature, culture and history together.

4. If you weren’t an anthropologist, what would you have done instead?
I used to work on a nature reserve and in fact became an anthropologist initially as a way to think about that sort of landscape. I certainly wouldn’t mind working on a reserve these days. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m fairly obsessed with wildlife and it would be good to work outdoors a bit more than I do.

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Andrew Whitehouse is a Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has conducted research in various parts of Britain and elsewhere on conservation issues and human–animal relations, with a particular focus on relations with birds through sound.

From Idea to Book- Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives

From Idea to Book is an occasional series in which Berghahn authors and Editors discuss the origins of their work. Here, Marcia Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne describe how the volume Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, which was recently published by Berghahn, came about.

Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologiesis the result of a wonderful conference workshop, held from 18 to 20 September 2009 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on the theme of “Islam and the Biotechnologies of Human Life.” Following a day of public presentations, the contributors to this volume remained at Yale for an intensive, two-day workshop discussion of their conference papers, which have ultimately become the polished chapters of this edited volume.

To our knowledge, this volume is unique, for it represents the work of nearly all of those scholars whose research focuses on Islam and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Meeting (often for the first time), discussing our work, and producing this volume together has been an immensely rewarding experience. For us as co-conveners, the project and the process have been especially gratifying, for we have been able to bring together our junior colleagues, many of whom are producing nuanced, field-based research on ARTs in a variety of Islamic settings. As a result, all of the chapters in this volume can be said to be original, timely, and “cutting edge,” reflecting the rapidly evolving ART landscape in the Muslim world in the second decade of the new millennium. Continue reading “From Idea to Book- Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives” →

Interview with the Editors- Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman, editors of Environment and Citizenship in Latin America

Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman are the editors of Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles, recently published by Berghahn. The work aims to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Here, they discuss the origins of their interest in the topic, where they see the work fitting within the field, and the process of putting the volume together.

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1. What drew you to the study of environmental citizenship?
We were both conducting extensive field research in different parts of Latin America (Wittman mainly in Guatemala and Brazil, Latta in Chile) during the early 2000s, when the field of citizenship studies was really picking up. At the same time, researchers working within a long tradition of “green” social theory started talking about “environmental citizens” and probing questions about what it means to think about ecological questions through the lens of citizenship. In the field we couldn’t help observing the way that struggles over environmental issues were closely bound up with debates over questions of recognition, inclusion, rights and inequality. The connection between environment and citizenship was plain to see in communities’ defense of their land rights, activists’ discourses around biodiversity or pollution, corporate agendas to tap natural wealth and government’s efforts to order and regulate different kinds of human-nature relationships. But as we observed this connection in practice, we were dissatisfied with debates about environmental citizenship amongst scholars from the Global North, which didn’t seem to offer the tools we needed to make sense of what was going on in Latin America. Before we even met we had independently decided to work at conceptual innovation to remedy this shortcoming

 

2. How did your perceptions of environment and citizenship change from the time you started work on this volume to the time you completed it?
Working on this volume was a good reality check for us. As a scholar it is easy to get wrapped up in one’s own self-referential bubble of theories, case studies and the like. Hearing what other scholars made of this connection between environment and citizenship had two kinds of outcomes. On the one hand, it confirmed our conviction that this is a fruitful intellectual space for thinking about a series of related ecological, social and political questions. There are all kinds of research avenues still to be explored. On the other hand, working with our collaborators during this project also reminded us that the terminology of citizenship, even as an analytical concept, is not innocent nor is there consensus about definitions and meanings. A number of the scholars who participated in the original workshop, including a couple whose pieces found their way into the book, were critical about the way the notion of citizenship potentially imposes a Western political ontology. They also pushed us with respect to the limits of citizenship as an analytical category (compared, for instance, to environmental justice). Even more importantly, these collaborators have demonstrated in their chapters how the discourses and practices of environmental citizenship can and have been mobilized by state and other actors as tools to re-enforce the subordination of politically marginal subjects such as indigenous peoples.

 

3. Do you think there are aspects of this work that will be controversial to other scholars working in the field? 
To the extent that the volume manages to complicate the terms of debate it is definitely our hope that other scholars in the field will feel the need to respond. There is a reason why the book is not titled “Environmental Citizenship in Latin America”. This collection is aimed to decentre the field of study, unsettling the easy union of these terms and putting in their place a more open-ended research agenda around the intersection of environment and citizenship. Obviously, the collection is also meant to stir the pot by reminding scholars that the Global South can’t be ignored as we seek to develop new paradigms of thought around environmental questions.

 

4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates amongst academics and activists within the Latin American Region?
The fact that the book is in English is a partial barrier to uptake amongst Spanish or Portuguese speaking audiences, though there is an increasing amount of collaboration and cross-fertilization between work conducted in the three different languages, regardless of where it is written and published. Indeed, six of our own contributors are from the region. Moreover, we’ve had excitement about the collection expressed by other Latin American colleagues in research networks to which we belong. There seems to be a hunger amongst scholars and activists in the region for more exploration of the kinds of themes the book’s contributors grapple with. At the same time, in the context of this and other projects we constantly feel that more needs to be done to join up academic debate across the North-South divide, and also to reach out more effectively from the academic sphere into activist circles.

 

5. Putting together an edited volume is a lot of work. Was it worth it?
The opportunity to collaborate on a volume like this, both in terms of our work together as editors and with respect to the larger network of scholars involved in the project, brings significant rewards. We were lucky to have a really dedicated group of contributors, who worked diligently through numerous rounds of revision. In general there is a lot of good feeling around the collaboration that went into this project, and I think we are all pleased with the outcome.

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Alex Latta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Hannah Wittman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Member of the Latin American Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.

Interview with the Editor- Gemma Blackshaw, Co-Editor of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Gemma Blackshaw, along with Sabine Wieber, is one of the editors of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness  in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In her own contribution to the volume, she discusses the work and life of Viennese author and poet and Peter Altenberg. Here, she answers questions about her research and herself.

1. What drew you to Peter Altenberg as a topic?
A caricature of Altenberg was chosen as the poster image for the Madness & Modernity exhibition I curated with Leslie Topp and Sabine Wieber, which looked at the relationship between mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna circa 1900 (Wellcome Collection, London and Wien Museum, Vienna, 2009-10). It was a last-minute addition to the exhibition, gratefully received from the Neue Galerie Museum for Austrian and German Art in New York, and I had little time to research its history. I touched upon Altenberg’s own experience of what was termed ‘nervous disorder’ in the accompanying catalogue in an essay on the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who painted Altenberg’s portrait in 1909, and made a mental note to follow up what seemed to me to be an intriguing set of questions: was Altenberg as ‘mad’ as he appeared in the caricature; did an answer to that question even matter; what were the circumstances of his being institutionalised; what was the value and the differences in being represented, and representing yourself, as ‘mad’? These questions formed the starting point of a long research journey which became so compelling a trail that I produced not only this essay but also a documentary film collaboration with artist and filmmaker David Bickerstaff titled Altenberg: The Little Pocket Mirror. Continue reading “Interview with the Editor- Gemma Blackshaw, Co-Editor of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire” →

Susan Hogan on Revisiting Her Groundbreaking Work on Feminist Art Therapy

Berghahn recently published Revisiting Feminists Approaches to Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan. It is both an update and an expansion of the earlier work Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy, first published in 1994. Here, Hogan addresses her reasons for revisiting her seminal work and explains why the topic is just as relevant today.

“Why do we need a book about women’s issues?” I am often still asked. Feminism is the principle of advocating social, political, and other rights of women as equal to those of men. It is necessarily interested in the question of equality. Creating a deep understanding of women’s conditions and women’s experience is one rationale for a volume specifically addressing this subject.

Another raison d’être of all my work in the field of art therapy is to challenge the reductive, and potentially damaging use of psychological ideas in art therapy practice. Continue reading “Susan Hogan on Revisiting Her Groundbreaking Work on Feminist Art Therapy” →