Entry #6

Hi all, here's an update on what I've been doing:

It's been more of the same with my advisor Sarah, who is still in the process of applying for grants for her upcoming research. This means a lot of proofreading on my end, helping to make sure they're as clear and effective as possible. In addition, she found a friend who had a copy of a new book that combines discourse analysis (specifically narrative analysis) and political ecology, titled The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks, by Raul Lejano, Mrill Ingram and Helen Ingram. (Her friend lent it to Sarah who's lent it to me.) It is indeed quite new, published in 2013, and contains what I've found to be a very useful chapter on methods of narrative analysis--terms for analysis such as emplotment, plurivocity, and characterization--all in the context of ecological systems. Seems really cool, and will certainly be helpful for my upcoming writing project. I plan on starting that this coming week; it's Spring Break and my advisor is gone for part of it, so that will give me a bit of time to finish this narratives book and the Fairclough text, which I mentioned in a previous post, as well as get started on my short story! I'm quite looking forward to it all.

I mentioned last week I'd give a run-down of a sort of discursive "timeline" about glaciers as delineated by Carey's essay How glaciers became an endangered species. Although Foucault explicitly mentions that discursive formations cannot be traced back to particular events--but rather it is the discourse itself that gives rise to other discursive "possibilities" --I still feel it is important to keep in mind a historical context when talking these kinds of trends. Apparently, up until the early 20th century, glaciers were thought of and depicted as sort of a menace; their inevitable creep, often destroying farmland and roads, was used as fodder for apocalyptic tales for hundreds of years. Simply put, (Western) people wished they would go away. This would correspond with the Romantic era of thought, which featured the notion of the sublime--the unfathomable power of nature in relation to man. This view of glaciers changed when the Little Ice Age ended around 1900, and glaciers started to melt. On one hand, despite the glaciers' slow disappearance, this melting was destructive; consequently formed glacial lakes are extremely unstable bodies of water, typically held in by week moraine dams, and often experiencing outburst floods and destroying villages (as was the case throughout the 20th century in Peru). On the other, and as the century progressed, these disappearances started to be viewed as visual markers for global climate change, and media coverage of their melting contributed to widespread knowledge of the phenomenon. In recent years, glaciers have shifted from an objective exemplar of global warming to a sort of "endangered species," as Carey puts it---sort of creatures in need of compassion and respect. This viewpoint is demonstrated by the "Save the Glaciers" discursive trend emphasized by much environmental literature, or the recent Greenpeace nation-building stunt pulled two weeks ago, which I wrote about in my blog post. It's all very interesting, but my questions are: what is the next phase in how we talk about glaciers? what sort of events might lead up to that? and what sort of epistemological repercussions might be brought about by this new narrative/discourse surrounding masses of ice? My creative writing project will touch upon these questions.

Have a good Spring Break!