Environment, Scientific Racism, and Public Communication (C19–20th)

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Beginning in the late C19th researchers, policy experts, and governments began using science to rationalize and legitimize colonial systems abroad and racialized governance systems at home. This constructed ideas about the relationship between racialized groups and the environment in urbanized and colonized spaces; their dissemination and popularization through photographs, journals, newspapers, and other formats played an important role in validating these systems. This panel will explore these public communication methods in the United States and Great Britain in the C19–20th from a comparative perspective, revealing how ideas about race and science were deployed in complex ways depending on goals and context.
Natalie Novoa explores the Playground Movement in the U.S. in the early C20th, centering on the Playground Association of America’s (PAA) monthly journal The Playground. Its essays by playground advocates and progressive reformers show how the language of scientific racism was embedded in conversations about park use and “proper play” for children. These sources demonstrate how race and class structured ideas about relationships to the natural environment and the role of outdoor recreation in the C20th. Stephanie Hood discusses visual culture on the British oceanographic expedition HMS Challenger (1872–1876). Drawings, paintings, and photographs from the voyage were circulated through newspapers, catalogs, academic books, and exhibitions. Through these we reveal interconnections of the expedition’s visual and scientific practices with colonialism, political propaganda, economic commodification, scientific racism, and public communication. Rob Gioielli examines race, visual culture, and colonialism in wildlife conservation. In the early 1960s, the World Wildlife Fund publicized images of slaughtered charismatic megafauna, particularly in Africa, to create and reinforce sentimental connections towards mobilizing global financial support for wildlife conservation. Their often explicit message was that newly independent countries in Africa could not protect these animals, thus justifying neocolonial forms of "fortress conservation."

Sponsored by ASEH CODIE.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Race, Class, and Natural Environment: Public Communication by the Bay Area Playground Movement (1920–1960) - Natalie Novoa, California State University, Fullerton

• Science, race, visual culture, and public communication of the British expedition HMS Challenger (1872–1876) - Stephanie Lauren Hood, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Race, visual culture, and colonialism in wildlife conservation (World Wildlife Fund, 1960s) - Robert Gioielli, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Chair

• Nicole Seymour, Cal State Fullerton