Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa. Contributors: Jane Carruthers Mara Goldman Amanda Hammar Jonathan Highfield David McDermott Hughes Roderick P. Neumann Rob Nixon Anthony Vital Laura Wright

The nineteenth century was an era of breathtakingly ambitious geographic expeditions across the Americas. The seminal Chorographic Commission of Colombia, which began in 1850 and lasted about a decade, was one of Latin America's most extensive. The commission's mandate was to define and map the young republic and its resources with an eye toward modernization. In this history of the commission, Nancy Appelbaum focuses on the geographers' fieldwork practices and visual production as the men traversed the mountains, savannahs, and forests of more than thirty provinces in order to delineate the country's territorial and racial composition. Their assumptions and methods, Appelbaum argues, contributed to a long-lasting national imaginary. What jumps out of the commission's array of reports, maps, sketches, and paintings is a portentous tension between the marked differences that appeared before the eyes of the geographers in the field and the visions of sameness to which they aspired. The commissioners and their patrons believed that a prosperous republic required a unified and racially homogeneous population, but the commission's maps and images paradoxically emphasized diversity and helped create a ""country of regions."" By privileging the whiter inhabitants of the cool Andean highlands over those of the boiling tropical lowlands, the commission left a lasting but problematic legacy for today's Colombians.

The sudden appearance of portolan charts, realistic nautical charts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, at the end of the thirteenth century is one of the most significant occurrences in the history of cartography. Using geodetic and statistical analysis techniques these charts are shown to be mosaics of partial charts that are considerably more accurate than has been assumed. Their accuracy exceeds medieval mapping capabilities. These sub-charts show a remarkably good agreement with the Mercator map projection. It is demonstrated that this map projection can only have been an intentional feature of the charts' construction. Through geodetic analysis the author eliminates the possibility that the charts are original products of a medieval Mediterranean nautical culture, which until now they have been widely believed to be.

Map reverse carries an illustrated gazetteer of sites of interest: approx. 6,600 wordsMap cover carries inside a brief history of Hull: 1,300 words. Illustrations: coloured engravings and early views of buildings, monuments and street scenesA full colour map, based on an Ordnance Survey map of 1928, with buildings and sites of interest picked out. Few cities have experienced Hull's uninterrupted position as one of Britain's leading centres of population and economic activity over nine centuries. The variety and richness of its architecture are too often overlooked. The map shows the main medieval and post-medieval buildings in this remarkable and interesting city, the second-most historic city of Yorkshire. The map's cover has a short introduction to the city's history, and on the reverse an illustrated and comprehensive gazetteer of Hull's main buildings and sites of interest, from medieval monasteries to cinemas and theatres, and the huge fortified citadel.

For a long time, the dynamics of urban and coastal areas have been the focus of administrators and decision makers in charge of public policy in order to better take into account anthropogenic pressure and the impact of climate change. This volume presents applications of remote sensing in urban environments and coastal zones, including the use of remote sensing in city planning (urban expansion, light pollution, air quality, etc.), observation of the properties of ocean color, the study of coastal dynamics (identifying coastlines and estimating sediment balances, etc.) and analysis of the dynamics of mangroves. This book, part of a set of six volumes, has been produced by scientists who are internationally renowned in their fields. It is addressed to students (engineers, Masters, PhD), engineers and scientists, specialists in remote sensing applied to the coastal environment and urban areas. Through this pedagogical work, the authors contribute to breaking down the barriers that hinder the use of Earth observation data.

'A most welcome book on the most neglected of topics by a pioneering team of interdisciplinary scholars. The volume illuminates the rendering asunder of the borders that previously protected personal information, even when the individual was in ''public'' and helps us see the muddying of the simple distinction between public and private. The book asks what public and private mean (and should mean) today as smart phones, embedded sensors and related devices overwhelm the barriers of space, time, physicality, and inefficiency that previously protected information. This collection offers a needed foundation for future conceptualization and research on privacy in literal and virtual public spaces. It should be in the library of anyone interested in the social, policy and ethical implications of information technologies.' - Gary T. Marx, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 'How we should think about privacy in public spaces in a world of artificial intelligence and ubiquitous sensors is among the most interesting and pressing questions in all of privacy studies. This edited volume brings together some of Europe and America's finest minds to shed theoretic and practical light on a critical issue of our time.' - Ryan Calo, University of Washington 'The deepest conundrum in the privacy world-especially, in light of the internet of other people's things-is perhaps the notion of privacy in public. Unraveling this practically Kantian antinomy is the ambitious aim of this important new collection. Together and apart, this intriguing assemblage of scientists, social scientists, philosophers and lawyers interrogate subjects ranging from conceptual distinctions between ''space'' and ''place'' and the social practice of ''hiding in plain sight'', to compelling ideas such as ''privacy pollution'' and the problem of ''out-of-body DNA''. With this edited volume, the team from TILT has curated a convincing account of the importance of preserving privacy in increasingly public spaces.' - Ian Kerr, University of Ottawa, Canada With ongoing technological innovations such as mobile cameras, WiFi tracking, drones, and augmented reality, aspects of citizens' lives are becoming increasingly vulnerable to intrusion. This book brings together authors from a variety of disciplines (philosophy, law, political science, economics, and media studies) to examine privacy in public space from both legal and regulatory perspectives. The contributors explore the contemporary challenges to achieving privacy and anonymity in physical public space at a time when legal protection remains limited in comparison to `private' space. To address this problem, the book clearly demonstrates why privacy in public space needs defending. Different ways of conceptualizing and shaping such protection are explored, for example through `privacy bubbles', obfuscation and surveillance transparency, as well as by revising the assumptions underlying current privacy laws. Scholars and students who teach and study issues of privacy, autonomy, technology, urban geography and the law and politics of public spaces will be interested in this book. Contributors include: M. Brincker, A. Daly, A.M. Froomkin, M. Galic, J.M. Hildebrand, B.-J. Koops, M. Leta, K. Mause, M. Nagenborg, B.C Newell, A.E. Scherr, T. Timan, S.B. Zhao