GO: On the Geographies of Gunnar Olsson

GO: On the Geographies of Gunnar Olsson
Author: Martin Gren
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317126769

Since the early 1960s, the internationally acclaimed and highly distinguished Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson has made substantial contributions to his own discipline. In addition, because of the transgressive nature of his work and writing, which often borders to art and philosophy, his ideas and approaches have reached a wider audience of those interested in the history and geography of ideas, culture and human reasoning. Olsson’s recent masterpiece, Abysmal, is a minimalist guide to the territory of Western culture. In it, he investigates how cartographical reason enables people to think about and navigate the abstract world of invisible human relations, in much the same way as they are able to study and traverse the physical Earth by using maps and mapping. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to, and overview of, the entire range of Olsson’s geography from the early days of spatial science to his contemporary engagement with, and critique of, cartographical reasoning. It includes selected samples of Olsson’s own writings, including rarities, together with a consolidated bibliography of his publications. It also contains critical engagements from leading scholars such as Michael Dear, Michael Watts, Chris Philo and Marcus Doel, with Olsson’s geography, from a variety of perspectives, which are particularly valuable to those readers who already know his work. It is structured and written in a way that makes Olsson’s geography accessible to a wide readership, including those who are not already familiar with Olsson’s work.

Lines of Power/limits of Language

Lines of Power/limits of Language
Author: Gunnar Olsson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 1991
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780816619498

Olsson attacks the basic structures that determine the organization of knowledge (vis-a-vis disciplinary boundaries) and demonstrates, on the one hand, the imbrication of language and the body, and on the other, the various bridges between concrete experiences of everyday life and the institutions of the state apparatus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Abysmal

Abysmal
Author: Gunnar Olsson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226629325

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives. A spectacular reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience—to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art.

Geography and Enlightenment

Geography and Enlightenment
Author: David N. Livingstone
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 470
Release: 1999-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226487212

Exploring both the Enlightenment as a geographical phenomenon and the place of geography in the Enlightenment, 14 papers from a July 1996 conference in Edinburgh survey the many ways in which the world of the long 18th century was shaped through map, text, exploration, and argument and within and across spatial and intellectual borders. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

Key Thinkers on Space and Place
Author: Mary Gilmartin
Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2024-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529787130

Space and place are at the heart of how geographers and sociologists think. This updated edition of the essential undergraduate text will introduce you to the most influential thinkers in the tradition of social theory, with a new focus on the past fifty years. This book is designed to engage with theoretical debates in human geography through the individuals who have made the most significant contributions to this field. This will show you how ideas are shaped by contexts, and how those ideas in turn effect change. This book shows how theoretical understandings evolve, shift and change. It also highlights the connections between different thinkers, whose ideas are developed in collaboration with or in reaction to others. Spatial thought is never developed in a vacuum, but is always constructed by individuals and groups of people located in particular institutional and social structures, with their own sets of personal and political beliefs. The biographical approach of this book reveals how individual thinkers draw on a rich legacy of ideas from past and contemporary generations. With increased coverage of international and female thinkers, as well as those who work against Eurocentric notions of space and place, this book reveals the exciting reorientation of Geography towards new ideas and methods in the last decade. Each entry contextualises its subject within on-going (inter)disciplinary debates and important political moments, as well as highlighting connections between different thinkers. Together the chapters uncover the rich and diverse evolution of social theory, equipping you with the foundational ideas of geographical thought. Each entry offers the following components: i) a short biography ii) an explanation of ideas iii) an exploration of how their ideas have been used and critiqued iv) a selective bibliography of key publications (and key publications which review or critique)

A History of Spaces

A History of Spaces
Author: John Pickles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1135104913

This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live. Going beyond the focus of traditional cartography, the book draws on examples of the use of maps from the sixteenth century to the present, including their role in projects of the national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health, disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and the transparent earth.

Poststructuralist Geographies

Poststructuralist Geographies
Author: Marcus A. Doel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1999
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780847698196

This work is the first attempt to integrate poststructuralist thought with the insights of critical human geography. Doel does not seek to make conventional approximations of poststrucuralist concepts but to rethink and rewrite the world through them.

Geographies of Media and Communication

Geographies of Media and Communication
Author: Paul C. Adams
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1405154136

Geographies of Media and Communication From the invention of the telegraph to the emergence of the Internet, communications technologies have transformed the ways that people and places relate to each other. Geographies of Media and Communication is the first textbook to treat all aspects of geography’s variegated encounter with communication. Connecting geographical ideas with communication theories such as intertextuality, audience-centered theory, and semiotics, Paul C. Adams explores media representations of places, the spatial diffusion of communication technologies, and the power of communication technologies to transform places, and to dictate who does and does not belong in them.

Geographical Voices

Geographical Voices
Author: Peter Gould
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2002-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780815629405

These highly personal essays reflect experiences and insights of key geographers of the past half-century. Contributors not only document the growing concern for research on social conditions and social justice, they also prove that scholarly commitment .is still vibrant and healthy in the discipline. A unique contribution in North American geographical publishing, this book is ideal for undergraduate courses in the history and philosophy of geography, and for early graduate seminars on recent developments in geographic thought.