Mental mapping of environmental health crises

Abstract (English)

Throughout history, communities have faced devastating environmental health crises (EHC), including infectious diseases or environmental disasters that result in water and air pollution, and placed a significant emphasis on mapping their surroundings accordingly. Vernacular mythologies, legends and warning narratives, which reflect mental and narrative maps related to such crises, divide places into safe and dangerous realms and prescribe religious behaviours or collective rituals to prevent or mitigate danger in perceived hazardous areas. By such mapping, fears are projected outwards and become associated with a particular location or direction, or a time or phase of a mythical journey. For example, while in everyday life an epidemic may spread almost randomly, in contrast, such crises in myths are always depicted as having a clear beginning and end, for instance being willed by the gods. Empirical evidence, such as responses to COVID-19 (cf. respective case studies in Hiiemäe 2016 and Hiiemäe et al. 2020), has demonstrated that even in secularized Western settings, such vernacular and/or religious explanations coexist and interact with scientific ones.
“Mapping Environmental Health Crises – Public Understanding through Myths and Science” (or in short: ‘Chryses’) is a European-funded project that explores the interplay between myths and science using maps as a versatile representation medium to understand how societies have conceptualised and represented EHC. As members of this project, we are organising this panel to discuss related synchronic and diachronic case studies to learn ways for improving future communication of public information about EHC. We are interested in comparative studies and case analyses that describe how groups or communities spatially conceptualize the interactions with EHC, how mental mapping mediated in vernacular narratives fosters individual agency and contributes to safety and wellbeing, and how these narratives cooperate or contradict with current scientific understandings of EHC-related risks.
What vernacular symbols, markers and polarisations are used to represent danger in such mental maps? How do cultural and socio-economic factors influence the mental mapping of environmental health risks? How do historical environmental health crises shape current mental maps and perceptions of danger? How can emotive understanding of critical spatial realities become a mappable journey, sharable and meaningful for a wider community? How could religious-mythical consciousness, which perceives the world in an immediate manner, encourage freedom to map various (subjective) degrees of reality within and beyond the sphere of mythical objectivity? Which narrative methods (literary, visual, spatial) have been/could be implemented for creative understanding of a crisis before, during and after the crisis condition? How have vernacular mental maps of environmental health crises been used (or potentially could be used) to improve public health communication and policymaking?