Logo image
Critical geopolitics and school textbooks: The case of environment-conflict links in Germany
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Critical geopolitics and school textbooks: The case of environment-conflict links in Germany

T. Ide
Political Geography, Vol.55, pp.60-71
2016
pdf
geopolitics of environment.pdfDownloadView
Author’s Version Open Access
url
Link to Published Version *Subscription may be requiredView

Abstract

This study explores the conceptual and empirical utility of studying school textbooks from a critical geopolitics perspective. School textbooks bind together various discourses, modalities and genres and can reflect the dominant knowledge in a given society. They therefore have a high potential to reveal the citational practices resonating between the domains of formal, practical and popular geopolitics. Studying school textbooks can also enrich the literature on children's and young people's (political) geographies by analyzing how the political worldviews and agency of young people are shaped by teaching materials. Empirically, the study draws on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to study how environment-conflict links are textually and visually portrayed in German geography and civics textbooks. The results suggest that German school textbooks significantly reflect the depictions of environment-conflict links in political, media and (popular) science discourses and thus reveal crucial citational practices. Drawing on the environmental security literature, it is further argued that these textbooks convey problematic geographical imaginations: they overemphasize the risk of environmental conflicts, reflect ideas of spill-over effects threatening the global north, and portray people from the global south as irresponsible and threatening.

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

Source: InCites

Metrics

200 File views/ downloads
112 Record Views

InCites Highlights

These are selected metrics from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool, related to this output

Citation topics
6 Social Sciences
6.86 Human Geography
6.86.149 Urban Politics
Web Of Science research areas
Geography
Political Science
ESI research areas
Social Sciences, general
Logo image