CHRYSES: Mapping Environmental Health Crises – Public Understanding through Myths and Science
While humanity has faced countless Environmental Health Crises (EHC) throughout its history, in recent times such crises have increased rapidly, not only in their occurrence and intensity but also in their global spread and consequences. Developing humanities-based strategies to better understand EHC and to identify and raise human responsibilities that lead to individual and societal actions to mitigate the destructive repercussions of these crises is, therefore, of critical importance at present. Current approaches to creating public understanding of such crises, however, stem from disparate disciplines and fields of concern. As such, these approaches on their own are unable to deal with the divisive prevalent narratives and evolving representations of the complex multidisciplinary nature of EHC. CHRYSES will take an interdisciplinary approach to creating a more common understanding of EHC by bringing together the perspectives provided by humanities and science using the medium of maps, as a physical and metaphysical representation form for journeys across space and time. We will investigate the interplay between myths and science in the ways our societies conceptualise and represent EHC, and utilise maps to unify the corresponding perspectives and approaches of myths and science to foster better public understanding of such global crises.
To achieve this, CHRYSES will focus on four objectives:
1) investigate the uses of the concepts of maps and journeys in ancient and modern mythology to narrate and represent EHC,
2) investigate the role of maps as a scientific tool to visualise, analyse, understand, and explain EHC,
3) investigate the role of maps in visual narratives as a metaphor and storytelling medium for unifying mythical and scientific approaches and perspectives on EHC, and
4) develop strategies for creating better public understanding of EHC through more effective societal engagement of the public and other stakeholders by combining myths and science.
Keywords:
environmental health crises, public understanding and trust, myths, maps, visual narratives, public health, crisis representation, visualisation.
Consortium:
Project Leader: Masood Masoodian, Aalto University, Finland
Reet Hiiemäe, Estonian Literary Museum, Estonia
Artemis Skarlatidou, University College London, United Kingdom
Jenny Butler, University College Cork, Ireland
Co- PI: – Shane Sheehan, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Associate partners:
Anne Mäkijärvi, Business Manager, Digimuseo.fi, Finland
Achievements: