Introduction: The Environment as Master Narrative: Discourse and Identity in Environmental Problems

Harper, Krista

doi:10.1353/anq.2001.0027

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…International contributions to Cordillera Blanca glacier hazard management since 1970 thus helped reduce disaster risk and promoted initiatives to lessen the potential impacts of glacier retreat and related GLOF hazards on local societies. Yet research elsewhere (Anderson 2009;Harper 2001;Sundberg 1998) also demonstrates how international scientists and experts can co-opt local agendas or perpetuate colonial and postcolonial power imbalances. International involvement, then, is not always beneficial to all stakeholders.…”

Section: Factors Facilitating Risk Reduction and Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An integrated socio-environmental framework for glacier hazard management and climate change adaptation: lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

et al. 2011

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Glacier hazards threaten societies in mountain regions worldwide. Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) pose risks to exposed and vulnerable populations and can be linked in part to long-term post-Little Ice Age climate change because precariously dammed glacial lakes sometimes formed as glaciers generally retreated after the mid-1800s. This paper provides an interdisciplinary and historical analysis of 40 years of glacier hazard management on Mount Hualcán, at glacial Lake 513, and in the city of Carhuaz in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range. The case study examines attempted hazard zoning, glacial lake evolution and monitoring, and emergency engineering projects to drain Lake 513. It also analyzes the 11 April 2010 Hualcán rock-ice avalanche that triggered a Lake 513 GLOF; we offer both a scientific assessment of the possible role of temperature on slope stability and a GIS spatial analysis of human impacts. Qualitative historical analysis of glacier hazard management since 1970 allows us to identify and explain why certain actions and policies to reduce risk were implemented or omitted. We extrapolate these case-specific variables to generate a broader socio-environmental framework identifying factors that can facilitate or impede disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Facilitating factors are technical capacity, disaster events with visible hazards, institutional support, committed individuals, and international involvement. Impediments include divergent risk perceptions, imposed government policies, institutional instability, knowledge disparities, and invisible hazards. This framework emerges from an empirical analysis of a coupled social-ecological system and offers a holistic approach for integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

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Section: Factors Facilitating Risk Reduction and Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An integrated socio-environmental framework for glacier hazard management and climate change adaptation: lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

et al. 2011

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“…Making a narrative ''Master'': technologies of emotion and logic Scholars in a number of disciplines have used the term ''master narrative'' to describe a range of normative conceptualizations and sociopolitical phenomena, such as dominant environmental discourses (Harper 2001), historically based gender and power relations (Erler 2003), media characterizations of military interventions (Hackett and Zhao 1994), teacher sex scandals and pedophilia (Cavanagh 2008), and broad intellectual revolutions, like ''the Enlightenment'' (Gikandi 2001).…”

Section: Beneath the Master Narrative 233mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beneath the master narrative: human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery and ethnographic realities

Snajdr

2013

Dialect Anthropol

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This paper explores the disconnections between anti-trafficking discourse and the local experience of responding to human trafficking as indicated in ethnographic data from Bosnia and Kazakhstan. Using the concept of ''uptake,'' I examine how anti-trafficking discourse operates as a master narrative, drawing on techniques of emotion and logic, as well as a specific type of victim story. I also consider how, despite an emerging counter discourse that questions the data and challenges current policy, human trafficking discourse continues to be retold in media and reproduced in popular culture, often in ways that actually diverge from the current version of the grand narrative. In contrast to these uncritical representations, ethnographic data from Bosnia suggest that the master narrative is selective in how it represents the history of the problem and that it does not ''take up'' important details about the context that fosters sexual exploitation, despite Bosnia's compliance with US policy. Conversely, Kazakhstan suffers a liminal status regardless of local efforts to prevent the problem from happening within its borders as well as evidence that the crime is not widespread. While perhaps not mythical, I suggest that the master narrative contains the stuff of legend as it occupies the critical spaces of policy, activism and development, leaving open the question of how to address the nuances and needs of responding to victims of gender violence.

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“…By integrating Senecah's "Trinity of Voice" with Ricoeur's narrated identity in our analysis, we understand not only the structural process elements necessary to grant voice in environmental policy development but also how those structural elements work to influence the construction of tribal members' political identity, further complicating nuclear waste policy development on tribal lands. Harper (2001) argues that understanding environmental narratives allows researchers to "uncover how the environment is constructed through political processes and who benefits or suffers from these constructions" (p. 102). Thus, a combined analytical approach contributes to our theoretical understanding of the interplay between narrative, voice, and identity, revealing its implications for nuclear waste policy development in general and provides a deeper understanding of the complexities of environmental conflicts within Native American communities.…”

Section: Voice and Political Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction of Goshute Political Identity: Negotiation of Voice Regarding Nuclear Waste Policy Development

Clarke

2017

Front. Commun.

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Introduction: The Environment as Master Narrative: Discourse and Identity in Environmental Problems

Cited by 19 publications

References 10 publications

An integrated socio-environmental framework for glacier hazard management and climate change adaptation: lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

An integrated socio-environmental framework for glacier hazard management and climate change adaptation: lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

Beneath the master narrative: human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery and ethnographic realities

The Construction of Goshute Political Identity: Negotiation of Voice Regarding Nuclear Waste Policy Development

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