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Dissertation Information for Karen Diane Oslund

NAME:
- Karen Diane Oslund

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2000)

ADVISORS:
- Theodore M. Porter

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary Terrall
- Peter H. Reill
- James Massengale

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Narrating the north: Scientific exploration, technological management, and colonial politics in the North Atlantic Islands

Abstract: This dissertation examines the cultural history of travel in the North Atlantic, which includes Iceland, Greenland, the polar regions, the Faroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, and the Hebrides, from roughly the mid-eighteenth century until the early twentieth. It argues that this region constituted a distinct "zone of local nature" for European travelers and natives living in this territory. As such, points of difference and similarity among various parts of this region and with continental Europe were the subject of many discussions, and different ways and measures of determining the level of civilization in the region and the relationship between the North Atlantic and Europe developed during this period. Each chapter of the dissertation discusses a different measure or method of ordering the region: landscape, flora and fauna, technology and material conditions, and language. For each measure or aspect of the North Atlantic, conflict developed over where the line of separation between "civilized" and "uncivilized" was drawn or what the order within this zone was. By drawing out the positions taken in these conflicts--which were carried out in travel books, administrative documents, natural histories, and other sources--the dissertation shows how different political, professional, and economic interests played roles in defining the "nature" of the North Atlantic. Because the North Atlantic islands were part of the Danish and British states during this period, comparisons are drawn between the European treatment of the North Atlantic with European orientalism and colonialism in other parts of the world. The case study examples in the North Atlantic show that these two concepts should not be understood as simple, binary constructs of power relations between self and other, colonizer and colonized, but that many different and "mediated" forms of these practices exist, some of which allow for colonized natives to define their own existence vis-a-vis powerful outsiders.

MPACT Scores for Karen Diane Oslund

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-11 21:13:07

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Students under Karen Diane Oslund

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None