Visualising the global environmental: new research directions

摘要

Abstract This special issue on the visual cultures of global environmental issues proposes innovative research directions by introducing new methodological frameworks and profoundly rethinking the crucial role of the visual in environmental research. The five papers gathered here were written by researchers coming from various disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, thus helping bridge the divides between different disciplinary traditions. Each essay examines the notion of the ?￠????global environment?￠????, and of ?￠????global environmental images?￠???? in particular, from a different theoretical perspective. From these emerge shared concerns about underlying aesthetics and politics, and reflections on the tensions that arise when visualising the environment, especially when objects and theories are at a global scale. In this introduction, I reflect upon two aspects across the five papers exploring tensions between the ?￠????local?￠???? and the ?￠????global?￠????, as well as the politics of images within global environmental research. Considered as an ensemble , this special issue calls for sustained interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images, paying close attention to the nature of this new type of global knowledge, the imaginaries mobilised, as well as the politics, power struggles, asymmetries and marginalisation processes which are inevitably involved when talking about the global environment.