Melbourne School of Land and Environment Department of Resource Management & Geography

Fraser MacDonald

Office:BSc (Glasgow) MSc DPhil (Oxford)
Lecturer

Office 2.02, 221 Bouverie Street
Tel. (+61 3) or (03) 8344 9318
Fax (+61 3) or (03) 9349 4218
E-mail fraserm@unimelb.edu.au

I am a human geographer. Among other things, this means that I am interested in what it means to be human; it also means that my scholarly explorations of being human are grounded in longstanding geographical concerns with space, place and landscape as well as in contemporary theoretical debates. At its broadest, my research examines the interrelation between bodies, spaces, knowledge and the state. More specifically, I work on three themes which straddle the humanities and the social sciences:
Visual culture -   I am interested in what it means to see and how the practical business of looking is bound up with other sensory registers. In this respect, I talk less of ‘vision’ than of ‘observant practice’. I think about how sensory perception in general, and the faculty of sight in particular, shapes geographical analyses. I also work on the relationship between geopolitics and visual culture and have recently co-edited a book of essays on this topic (Observant States: geopolitics and visual culture, IB Tauris, 2009). A related project is a study of the American modernist photographer, Paul Strand.  

Geopolitics -   My primary writing project is a monograph on the cultural history of Cold War rocketry, tracing the passage of Britain and America's first nuclear missile through the popular and political cultures of the 1950s, and examining particular episodes of missile testing and contesting in the Scottish Hebrides. This research is situated within the literature on critical geopolitics, a body of work that I have recently extended to the contemporary ‘geo’-graphies of Earth’s orbit and outer space.

Histories of social and scientific knowledge -   Drawing on literatures in the history of science, I am interested in the history of fieldwork in the twentieth century, both in geography and other human sciences. One example is some recent writing on the practical pedagogy of Patrick Geddes. A second project considers the politics of folklore in the Cold War period, looking at the ‘salvage’ of story and song by collectors at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies.  
I am on the editorial board of the journals Geography Compass and Altitude.

Supervision:

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in projects across cultural, historical and political geography. Current PhD students include:
Melanie Thomson - Wild Animals in Civilised Places: interventions and transgressions  [published work here]
Anja Kanngieser - Performative Encounters, Transformative Worlds: creative experiments as radical politics, Germany, 2000–2006 [published work here and here]
Wendy Garden - The Empire Shoots Back: the politics of photographic self representation in Australia
Kelly Donati - The Passion and Pleasure of Urban Food Activism

Teaching:

121-017   Society and Environments
121-307   Geographical Thought 

Selected publications:

Edited books

MACDONALD, F., Hughes, R., and Dodds, K. (2009) Observant States: geopolitics and visual culture, I. B Tauris, London

Recent journal articles

MACDONALD, F. (2008) ‘Space and the Atom: on the popular geopolitics of Cold War rocketry’ Geopolitics 13.4, pp. 611-634. full text

MACDONALD, F. (2007) ‘Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography’  Progress in Human Geography 31.5, pp.592-615. full text

MACDONALD, F. (2006) ‘Geopolitics and 'the vision thing': regarding Britain and America's first nuclear missile’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30: pp. 53-71. full text

MACDONALD, F. (2006) ‘The last outpost of Empire: Rockall and the Cold War’ Journal of Historical Geography, 32, pp. 627-647. full text

MACDONALD, F. (2005) ‘On the value of historical ethnography’ Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 24.2: pp. 159-181.

MACDONALD, F. (2004) ‘Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War’ History of Photography 28.4: pp. 356-373. full text

MACDONALD, F. and Cumbers, A. (2002) ‘When Brown was Red’, Soundings 12 (edited by Doreen Massey, Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin) 13: pp. 64-78.
Lorimer, H. and MACDONALD, F. (2002) ‘A rescue archaeology, Taransay, Scotland’ Cultural Geographies 9: pp. 95-102.

MACDONALD, F. (2002) ‘Towards a spatial theory of worship: some observations from Presbyterian Scotland’, Social and Cultural Geography, 3.1: pp. 65-84. full text

MACDONALD, F. (2001) ‘St Kilda and the Sublime’, Ecumene, 8.2: pp. 151-174. full text

Recent book chapters

MACDONALD, F. (submitted) ‘Patrick Geddes and the optic of geography’, in Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, Jim Ketchum and Douglas Richardson (eds) Geography and the Humanities, Routledge, London full text
MACDONALD, F. (2009) ‘Visuality’ in N Thrift and R Kitchin (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography Elsevier [a 5000 word essay]. full text

MACDONALD, F. (2009) ‘High Empire: rocketry and the popular geopolitics of space exploration, 1944-1962,

in James R Ryan and Simon Naylor (eds) New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century, I B Tauris, London
MACDONALD, F. Hughes, R and Dodds, K. (2009) ‘Envisioning geopolitics’, in F. MacDonald, K. Dodds and R. Hughes (eds) Observant States: geopolitics and visual culture, I B Tauris, London
MACDONALD, F. (2009) ‘Perpendicular Sublime: regarding rocketry and the Cold War’, in F. MacDonald, K. Dodds and R. Hughes (eds) Observant States: geopolitics and visual culture, I B Tauris, London
MACDONALD, F. (2003) ‘Sublime geographies, situated histories’ in Makrolab [exhibition catalogue for the Venice Biennale], Arts Catalyst, London
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