Author Archives: Rebekah

The Map is not the Territory: Re-imagining Place, Reweaving Story

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Natalie Mitchell, a first-year MA Contemporary Literature & Culture student, shares insights from Professor Marina Warner’s lecture that took place as part of the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of Birkbeck joining the University of London.

City of women map by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, ‘City of Women 2.0’, 2019. Courtesy: the artists

Professor Dame Marina Warner took her audience on a fascinating journey through the role of mapping in storytelling and memory, in her lecture, which forms part of the 100 Years of the University of London lecture series. Using Alfred Korzybski famous axiom ‘the map is not the territory’, which suggests that a map cannot encompass the true quality of a place, Professor Warner considered the re-imagining of place and how mapping can become a rebellious act.

She began the lecture considering the many roles of cartography in territory making, defining borders, resources, military and governance, and how this informs our memory of place. The map attempts to ‘actualise history’ through naming, marking and dividing, but the construction of history is a type of narrative. A point Professor Warner emphasised through the words history and story, which are the same in many languages. As such, mapping can control the narrative of a place and becomes an important tool for colonisers, although it may bear little resemblance to the reality of a place by its indigenous people.

Adam Dant – Shoreditch as New York – 2018

The activity of creating maps can also realise fiction, such as the detailed fictional maps in the novels Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings. Similarly, star maps give mythical gods a presence in reality through the stargazer’s eye and theme parks and Disney castles parody real locations through the child’s imagination. In this way, the fictional locations of stories can become real locations; these narratives ‘folding back’ onto the actual.

Professor Warner went on to suggest that the map can function in time as well as space, making the past present. This was particularly notable in Emma Willard’s mapping of aboriginal tribes in America and her Progress of the Roman Empire, charting time using the course of the Amazon river. These reworkings of maps can also perform a ‘historical resistance’ as seen in Layla Curtis’ NewcastleGateshead collaged map of all the places renamed after those cities, which highlights the colonial activity of claiming places through naming. Such use of cartography revealed the potential rebellious nature the renaming of maps can perform.

Artist Mona Caron and cartographer Ben Pease - Monarchs and Queens - 2010

Artist Mona Caron and cartographer Ben Pease – Monarchs and Queens – 2010

This type of resistance was expanded further by Professor Warner through many recent examples of the renaming and reworking of maps and places. In Paris in 2015, Osez le Feminisme flyered the city’s street signs, renaming them to notable women from history. Artists have also reimagined places via the redrawing of maps, such as Rebecca Solnit’s and Adam Dant’s maps, which create a visual narrative, questioning the authority of the map and returning to a cartography blending art and science. Similarly, Simon Patterson’s iconic reworking of the London tube map in his work The Great Bear renamed the stations after a myriad of famous and forgotten figures from history. Through each of her examples, Professor Warner showed how the reimagining of the map ‘makes the familiar unfamiliar’ and how a sense of place can be reclaimed by those in situ.

Simon Patterson - The Great Bear - 1992

Simon Patterson – The Great Bear – 1992

Professor Warner’s lecture was bookended by her recent work with a collective of young migrants in Palermo, Sicily, through the Stories in Transit workshop project Giocherenda. These workshops involved the young people developing stories of the city using the figure of The Genius of Palermo, a 15th century icon who has become a synonymous symbol of the city. The workshop took place around the city, where the young people placed the historical figure in different locations. Through this, they could develop their own sense of their new home in Palermo, but through the use of the city’s history. She expressed how it was the children who wanted to use mapping in their story creations and in doing so created a sense of belonging in an unfamiliar place.

Professor Warner concluded her lecture by emphasising the importance of continuing to create stories. Storytelling is an action and a way of history-making and in the days of fake news and big data, it is even more paramount.

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Bernal Lecture 2020: Fifty Shades of Grey Matter

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Clare Samson, Senior Associate Lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of Biological Sciences reports on the annual Bernal lecture that was given by Cordelia Fine, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science on Monday 4 February, that explored whether there really is an essentially male and female brain.

photo of head bust printed

Professor J.D. Bernal is remembered for work on the social consequences of science as much as for his ground-breaking research, and these lectures have frequently focused on societal issues. The choice of Cordelia Fine, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, Australia as the 2020 lecturer echoes Bernal’s passionate advocacy of women in science; Fine’s choice of title, Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, proved an engaging one. Tickets ran out long before the lecture, which took place on Monday, 4 February 2020; the lecture theatre was packed, and Fine held her audience’s attention throughout.

Fine began by explaining how our 19th-century ancestors viewed the difference between the sexes. Less than 150 years ago, the overwhelming majority accepted that men and women were biologically determined for their different roles. In 1876 a Professor Edward Clarke wrote a best-selling book that suggested that ‘if a woman were to engage in the hard-intellectual labour of higher education, it would divert energy from her [clearly far more important] reproductive system’. Even progressive voices supporting women’s education claimed that it would help them become ‘more interesting wives and better mothers’. Scientific justification for these views often focused on one simple variable: brain size. Since an average male brain is significantly larger than a female one, they argued, one would expect women to be intellectually inferior.

It is easy to argue against that viewpoint, since we are not ruled by elephants or whales. This degree of bias seems bizarre to our ears, yet, as Fine explained, we all – even neurologists and psychologists – look, perhaps unconsciously, through biased lenses. Differences between male and female brains do exist, but they are highly complex and subtle ones. She identified three main biases: androcentrism, in which the masculine view of the world is taken as central; gender polarisation, in which the masculine and the feminine are seen as polar opposites; and biological essentialism, in which traits are seen as innate and biologically (often genetically) determined, rather than arising from both nature and nurture.

Much of the lecture focused on the way in which gender polarisation continues to affect both academic and popular science. This bias is seen in the proliferation of ‘pop psychology’ books, arguing that men are from Mars and women from Venus; that men are like waffles and women like spaghetti; or that there is some innate reason why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps. Academic books setting out reasons for this ‘essential difference’ between male and female brains are still being written, and still sell well.

She presented a case study of a paper in a reputable journal that seemed to show innate differences between the connectivity of male and female brains: that is, the way they are ‘wired’.  According to this paper, female brains have stronger connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, while male ones have stronger connections between each hemisphere. Fine noted that although the difference was there, it was a tiny one. All the pairs of ‘bell curves’ showing brain characteristics of the women and men in the study overlapped so greatly that any differences would be described as ‘modest’ at most. No differences justified the word ‘striking’ used in the paper’s title, and no correlations were given with behaviour. Press officers, however, see headlines rather than read graphs. Publication of this paper led to headlines such as ‘Men and women wired like different species – expert’ (New Zealand Times); ‘Yes, each sex is really from a different planet’ (Metro, UK); and even ‘Women crap at parking: official’ (The Register).

Gender polarisation is summed up in the idea of a single scale with ‘100% male’ and ‘100% female’ brains at opposite ends, suggesting that they are opposites and, at times, equating the ‘extreme male brain’ with autistic tendencies. It is possible to take a quiz to position your brain at some point between the ‘systemising’ male brain and the ‘empathising’ female one, but the results can be odd: Fine quoted a colleague who found, on taking the test, that he seemed to have ‘no brain at all’. Even popular psychology makes more sense if ‘systemising’ and ‘empathising’ are seen as different characteristics with no relationship to gender. The idea of men as stereotypically problem-solvers and women as collaborators should be consigned to the past. Each community – including the scientific community – will flourish best when it is diverse, open and able to identify and eliminate bias.

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Collaborating with east London’s university community

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Hester Gartrell, Senior Outreach and Access Officer for Stratford discusses the East London Collaboration Day that she organised with universities operating in east London. She also discusses the onus behind creating the East London Widening Participation Forum. 

While many might be used to universities coming together to recruit students at Higher Education Fairs, on the 25 February we brought universities together for a slightly different reason. 

Rather than just showcasing the courses offered by different universities, the East London Universities Collaboration Day aimed to make educational professionals working in schools, colleges and other organisations more aware of the outreach and widening participation offer available from universities based in east London.  

We all know that with increasing workloads and lots of things to juggle, it can often be difficult for teachers or other educational professionals to know who to contact at a university. Bring into the mix that universities have different specialties and their access work might focus on different groups and you have a situation where education professionals want to engage their students with the idea of university but don’t know where to start.  

This event that I set up and run in partnership with China Anya, Senior Outreach Officer at Loughborough University of London aimed to address this by giving people the opportunity to find out about the different universities specialities and meet face to face with widening participation teams. Attendees had the chance to network with universities and hear more about their outreach work, as well as take part in a workshop and panel session which covered topics such as student wellbeing, part-time study and funding options.  

Ten universities attended including established east London Higher Education institutions such as Queen Mary and the University of East London, and more recent arrivals to the area including Loughborough, Coventry and Staffordshire Universities.  

The day was part of a wider initiative, the East London Widening Participation Forum that was set up in 2019 as part of the Access and Engagement Department’s outreach work in the Borough of Newham.  

It’s important that universities work together to help those who face barriers to accessing higher education. With lots of universities coming to east London as part of developments such as the Olympic park, 2019 seemed like the perfect time to bring established east London universities and more recent arrivals together. The aim of the forum is to see how we can work in partnership to help east Londoners take advantage of the activities and information about Higher Education offered by our forum’s members – who are right on their doorstep! 

We’re looking forward to seeing where the forum goes from here and are definitely hoping to run more workshops and events. We had over 30 professionals come along to the event and feedback from attendees has been great. There’s clearly an appetite for universities to come together and share their knowledge and expertise in a collaborative way. 

 

 

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Rosetta’s views of Comet 67P

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Mauro Pirarba BSc, a Planetary Sciences Graduate Certificate student and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, discusses Dr Ramy El-Maarry’s recent talk on the geology of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Figure 1 – Five comets have been photographed at close range during flyby missions, but only one, comet 67P, has been studied closely for an extensive period of time (image credit: El-Maarry et al., 2019, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11214-019-0602-1)

Comets are temperamental, often breaking all rules, suddenly appearing out of nowhere, occasionally getting close enough to the Sun and the Earth to display long tails that make us marvel at their beauty and diversity. They have been studied by astronomers for centuries and yet we still do not understand them fully.

What can Dr. Ramy El-Maarry, a geologist at Birkbeck College, possibly tell about one of them, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, at a special meeting organized by the Royal Astronomical Society?

Does that C-something – G-something sound vaguely familiar? Perhaps you are more likely to remember another name, Rosetta, the probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) tasked with deciphering its mysteries, a few years ago. Launched in 2004, Rosetta reached Comet 67P in August 2014 and spent two years observing it closely.

“I have 80,000 images from that mission and 20 minutes to go through them…”, Ramy started his talk, to everybody’s laughter.

In fact, such a big figure hints at an unprecedented and extraordinary achievement. Twelve spacecrafts have sent back to Earth data about eight different comets and images of six of them (see figure.1). What makes Rosetta stand out is the length of the observation, two years, and its closeness, on average a few tens of kilometres. You may also remember that the mission included a lander, Philae, which failed to anchor itself to the ground and bounced a few times, before settling down and sending back images and data. The greatest feat though was achieved by the “mothership”, Rosetta, which accompanied the comet for most of its orbit around the Sun, taking images that show details as small as a fraction of a meter. These images have allowed scientists for the first time to observe geological processes, as they happened, on the surface of a comet.

We are all familiar with the effects of water, ice, temperature excursions and wind in weathering, transporting and depositing sediments, reshaping the landscape on the Earth. We’ve seen images of craters and the effects of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on our planet. What geological processes has ESA’s spacecraft uncovered on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko?

This is a tiny world with a miniscule gravity and an irregular shape (approximately 4 x 4 x 2 km), made of porous and light material rich in different ices. The agent driving most geological processes on P67 is solar radiation. As the comet orbits the Sun along a very elongated orbit, which takes it further away from our star than Jupiter and then brings it not much closer to the Sun than Mars, insolation varies dramatically and seasons become extreme. Autumn and winter last about 5.5 years in the northern hemisphere, while the southern spring and summer last nearly a year and are relatively hot, causing the icy surface to sublimate copiously, creating a coma, a tenuous atmosphere. Activity is patchy, occasionally “violent”, jets of gas burst into space taking dust and larger particles with them. Significant amounts of gas and some of the dust are lost, but part of the solid material is transported by “winds” to the northern hemisphere, blanketing it with dust and coarser grains. Over time, the material moves down gentle and steep slopes, “pushed” by the weak gravity, forming a variety of terrains. These give the northern hemisphere a very different look from that of the southern half, which is quite rugged (see figure.2). One of the most striking images shown by Ramy was one where aeolian ripples appeared on an otherwise smooth terrain in the neck of the comet, a narrow region connecting the two main “lumps” that make up 67P. No one had ever thought such features could occur on a comet.

Figure 2 -Dr. El-Maarry shows how different the northern and southern hemispheres of comet 67P appear (image credit: El-Maarry et al., 2019, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11214-019-0602-1 and El-Maarry et al., 2016, https://www.aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/201628634).

The rate of ices’ sublimation is so high in some areas that several meters of materials are removed during the summer, uncovering a variety of features. Some of these are circular and resemble craters, others look like depressions that wax and wane over time. Their origin is baffling geologists, as that of other so-called transient surface features. Somewhere else on the surface of the comet new pits (probably sinkholes) appear and cliffs collapse. Outbursts of activity, driven by the Sun’s heat, propel jets that like rockets push the ground in the opposite direction, varying the speed of rotation of the comet. The resulting forces cause tension, leading to the formation of tectonic fractures, as several photos shown by Dr. El-Maarry clearly prove. Picture after picture a tiny complex word emerges, revealing to us in detail what we had been able to observe only from very far or for very brief instants, in the case of other comets.

In August 2016, Rosetta ended its mission and landed softly on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The legacy of the mission is not just what it has taught us about Comet P67, but it goes beyond. As Ramy summed up at the end of his talk, the number of images and other data collected in situ is helping scientists not only to understand 67P, but also interpret previous and future mission to other comets. A long time is likely to pass, before a probe like Rosetta will be launched.

In the meantime, Comet Interceptor, a new exciting cometary mission is taking shape at ESA. We’ll ask Ramy to bring a few thousand pictures next time…

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