Visual Methodologies and Geography's education in the pandemic time: notes on geopolitics of migration in the "Mediterranean Complex"

1.   Introduction

The relationship between Geography, Vision and Visuality has always been strong intertwined, as Geography operates through images in the form of pictures, creative representations and above all cartographies ^[1]. Indeed, it was precisely the alliance between cartography and colonialism that made the seventeenth century pivotal to the establishment of the world-as-image ^[2]: through the geographical explorations made by sea—very soon became expeditions—the interweaving between modernity, capitalism, colonialism, and globalisation was established ^[3], by creating the representation of a world divided into the West and the Rest. A process we can also observe during the nineteenth century, a time fundamental in the history of the representation of the world as it was the time of the Great Exhibitions, spaces in which "Otherness" was put on display for the Western gaze ^[4] by building the epistemic violence ^[5].

The right to look by Nicholas Mirzoeff ^[6] is considered a masterpiece of the visual studies. In the attempt to track down a decolonial genealogy of visuality, Mirzoeff identifies—already in the introduction of the volume—three settings of visuality authoritative power and visual resistance to it, that he calls "complexes": the plantation complex of the Atlantic slave trade, visuality's first domain; the imperialist complex of the British Empire; the military industrial complex of President Eisenhower geopolitics. In these complexes, a specific modality of visuality is in action. First, visuality classifies by naming, categorising, and defining. This process of the Western eye of registration and fixing in a single and unique representation acts as in a sort of Medusa's syndrome ^[7]: this petrification of the Other progressively installs the relationship between who looks and who is looked. Then, visuality separates the group so classified as a means of social organisation. The dichotomy between who has the power to represent and who is represented by it, implies a technology of government that divides between who is the visual "subject", and who is the viewed "object"—a process that involves objectification, dehumanisation and the killability of the Other. Finally, visuality makes this classification aesthetic, real and right through repetition. The objects of the Western eye accumulate in the form of the ditto ditto in the archive of violence ^[8], where they become mere numbers of history.

At the same time, a "complex" is a space where visuality clashes against counter-visualities by producing imaginaries breaking the archive, where this clash is the practice that digs interstices in our world by imagining and shaping new alternatives ones.

With this theoretical framework as a background, this article will focus on the relationship between the visual and a particular field of the geographical discipline, that one of geopolitics, and specifically geopolitics of migration, which is the name of the course we teach¹ at the University of Palermo. Geopolitics of migration is a critical course divided into three parts: critical cartography; geopolitics' narrations in time and space; a focus on the Mediterranean Sea, a sea-space turned into a liquid border by contemporary international politics. As the main aim of the course is the construction of a critical thought about what is a dominant geopolitical narration—which acts through practices, politics, and images—and what are the multiple counter-narrations clashing against its violent spatial relationship of power-knowledge—in the form of counter-practices, counter-narratives, counter-visualities—lessons have always made use of the visual, in the form of slides presentation, cartographic projects, images deconstruction. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the didactics interaction: as a matter of fact, starting from 2020, the use of the visual in geographical didactics has been no longer a choice of methodology, but a necessity, and the use of images has enormously increased.

¹ The Professor of the course is Giulia de Spuches, Full Professor at the University of Palermo of Geography, Cultural Geography and Geopolitics of Migration.

In this article I will first present a brief standpoint of visual geography. I will then present a visual methodology we used in our class during the pandemic time with three specific images of the "Mediterranean complex" by focusing on the use of visual materials to disseminate research, and, in our case, didactics ^[9]. Finally, I will track down some first thoughts we can trace about this relationship between geography and the visual, made stronger by distance learning, and about the changing nature of our didactics spaces.

2.   Materials and methods

2.1.   Vision and visuality

As the etymology of the word already shows, the relationship between geography and the visual is deep. Indeed, the suffix has meant and continues to mean a writing of the earth made visible through images, in the form of pictures, photographs, and of course, cartographies. As Cosgrove points out, "Vision in the sense of active seeing is inescapable in the practice of geography" because, as a practice of "exploring, reporting, and recording the varied surface of the earth […] eyewitness knowledge and verifying the truth of visual observation were crucial features of geographical science" ^[10]. In her masterwork Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Gillian Rose builds what she calls a critical visual methodology, by intending with it "an approach that thinks about the visual in terms of cultural significance, social practices and power relations in which it is embedded". As we are constantly surrounded by a big data production of images and by different sorts of visual technologies, it is important to keep in mind that "all these different sorts of technologies […] render the world in visual terms". A rendering which is never innocent, as "these images are never transparent windows onto the world. They interpret the world; they display it in very particular ways; they represent it" ^[9].

In drawing up this critical visual methodology, a constant reference is the work of Donna Haraway, who, in her Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature tracks down the system of ocularcentrism² as the dominant male, white, western gaze, a system structured by the world of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism: "Histories of science may be powerfully told as histories of the technologies. These technologies are ways of life, social orders, practices of visualization. Technologies are skilled practices. How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinkered? Who wears blinkers? Who interprets the visual field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?" ^[11].

² The notion of ocularcentrism was used by Ó Tuathail in order to underline the Western privileging of vision aimed at a particular structuring of space, essential to the European expansion. At the author-meets-critics panel of the 1997 Association of American Geographers conference, he received many critical comments; among the others, Sparke and Sharpe referred to Haraway's work as a opposite position, as she provides some direction on why vision cannot be dismissed and must be politically engaged ^[12].

At the same time, it is exactly in those interstices of power of visualization technologies that we can imagine new visions, i.e., new worlds, new relationships, new ways of constructing knowledge. A practice and imagination made possible through a feminist methodology of situated knowledge and reflexivity. Indeed, with situated knowledge, the position is always referred to a partiality and never to a universality, with a view not from above, but from "somewhere". This view implicates a politics of location and an embodied vision; a vision that, in this way, opens to new visualities, where images are no longer cages of the violence of representation, but means of imagination of new ways of seeing the world. In the wake of Haraway's suggestions, we can put Crang's work, who argues how the need on visual geography is to move from a "formation looking at people, to one which as Trinh Minh-ha might put it, is an indirect gaze 'looking nearby'. The implication is not then that we should abandon visual methods and techniques but find new ways of thinking them, with new sense of vision […]. A practice that must be imaginary" ^[13].

In her work, Rose made a distinction between vision and visuality: vision is what the human eye is physiologically capable of seeing; visuality refers to how vision is constructed in various ways. But, as Cosgrove points out, vision is not just this ocular ability of the body, but a more imaginative sense of creating images: "Vision's meaning incorporates imagination" ^[10]. Counter-visualities in this sense are our tools to image, practice and made visible what is invisible, the not-yet, the absence, the possible: a world in progress.

2.2.   Spaces and images: the visual performance in geographical knowledges

A possibility to reflect about the visual nature of geography is given by the way in which geographers present their geographical research, which is always structured through various forms of images. In other words, is given by "the ways in which particular visualities structure certain kinds of geographical knowledges, knowledges—and thus visualities—that are always saturated with power relations" ^[14]. As a matter of fact, it is a widespread practice to present and explain the geographical thought, either in conference or in didactic lessons, with slides that present and made visible, through graphs, maps, photographs or arts images, the geographer's research and knowledges. In this sense, both in the more formal academic space of the conference, and in the more comfortable space of the class, a performance takes place, thus questioning issues of power's spatial relationships.

In her article On the Need to Ask how exactly is Geography Visual? Gillian Rose tracks down this performance's effects through the three elements whose intersection constitutes the visual's effect: the image, its audience, its space of display ^[14]. Slides showing images are powerful tools to use. By focusing the audience gazes on them, they regulate the behaviour both of the geographer presenting the thoughts, and of the audience: sometimes the speaker turns toward the screen and talk by looking at the images rather than to his/her audience and can also be relief because audience's attention is diverted toward the screen. This also means that sometimes we put more slides on the presentation than needed, even if they are not very fitting or useful for the discourse, just because images discipline and regulate our discourse, and so our performance.

At the same time, those slides discipline audience's gaze and invite to put attention and to believe in what they show, as their power is to charge of authority the speaker. Therefore, "the most important distinction between a slide and what it pictures is less visual […] than it is relational". In this visual performance of power-knowledge, the slide, assumed as showing the truth of the discourse, becomes the real of the presentation, and the geographer becomes a mediator between the image and the audience, as it is the image that "confirms the truth of our words". Furthermore, a relation of power is structured between the speaker and the audience because of the single vision of the slide projector focusing the attention and the mono-voice of the speaker. A relationship that in my opinion is definitely stronger when this performance occurs between professor and students than when among academic scholars and researchers—even if hierarchies of power are at work also there. As regards audience component, Rose also underlines how it reacts differently to images and more generally to presentation/lesson: people can pay attention, being involved or more authoritative than the speaker; they can be bored, distracted, talking to other people, sleeping—in a conference, as well as in class.

The last element Rose's scheme of visual effect is the space of visual images' display, i.e., the space in which the image, the geographer and the audience meet. Space determinates the performance for dimension (being closer or far from the speaker can determines audience's attention, as well as the speaker's confidence); "nature" (if the space is a big hall for academics conference or the intimate space of the class of our university it regulates particular social agreements and gestures); mode (to look at images in a museum, in a class or in a conference venue is different, as the specific spatiality "refracts the images displayed through it"). In other words, space is the pivotal element that determines the geographer discourse's performance—both in conference halls and in universities classrooms. This means that, as the space changes, the performance changes, as well as the relationship between speaker and audience, between speaker and image, between image and audience.

What happens when this performance happens totally online, where the image showed by the slide is full-screen and the audience is invisible with cameras off? What happens when the space is "virtual" and "digital"?

3.   Discussion and results

3.1.   Didactics and the pandemic: implications of visual's effects in a virtual classroom

At the moment in which this article is written, the pandemic of the Covid-19 has been infesting the globe for two years now, already going through several waves and variants, as well as different phases in terms of political management. Exploded in Italy at the beginning of March 2020, the pandemic phenomenon has determined a radical change of social behaviours due to the need of social distancing. Schools and universities were the first to be closed and to be moved into a modality of smart working and distance learning. More than the school, now experiencing a coming back to the in-person lessons, the university seems remaining at the margins of the political management of the pandemic, as didactics is still online or, in some cases, in a mixed modality. This is probably due to the bigger number of students attending the academic space, so that it is more difficult to control social distancing. At the same time, this is probably also because the pandemic, as a political, social, and economic phenomenon ^[15], is working as a sort of laboratory of experimentation. A phenomenon we can observe as regards the big digital acceleration: for years the university has been testing for a breakthrough in digitalisation; with the pandemic this process was implemented in a couple of months. However, in both school and university, distance learning has often acted as a tool for implementing social inequality: this is due to the deep digital divide (at least in Italy), the different condition of the domestic space, the diverse mode of learning not taken into account—which also includes more fragile students with special educational needs or disabilities ^[16].

"The classroom as the most radical space" ^[17] has undergone several changes, including the needs to rethink the didactics approaches and methodology. As the screen became the medium of connection between professor and students, images, film, video, slides with power point projection have enormously increased, probably for three main reasons.

First, the attention paid in an in-presence lesson is greater than the attention paid in an online lesson, as it is more difficult to listen to someone talking from a screen and the environment is not that one of learning, so distractions increase—simply by looking for something in Google, doing something else while listening, talking to someone you share the domestic space with. In this sense, sharing images and videos is a way to keep the attention high by interrupting the mono-voice of the professor speaking through a screen.

Second, as the environment of learning is no more shared with a community of people understanding together about some specifical themes, various and mixed tools are needed to best convey a concept that can reach everyone, by making it visible.

Third, the visual methodology makes possible to construct knowledge based on collective questions and encouraging debates and interventions that would not otherwise find space in the distance mode, where teaching can be easily reduced to a frontal lesson in which notions are transmitted (even if this was a problem also without the pandemic conditions).

Coming back to Rose's structure of the visual's effect ^[14], we can observe how the agency of the three main elements deeply changes. As regards images in the form of slides, they are no more just the device disciplining the didactics "performance", but they are its total focus in a way that outperforms the other elements. As a matter of fact, in the moment in which we share slides in our virtual learning platform—Microsoft Teams in our case—the only thing visible is our PowerPoint. From the point of view of the speaker, her/his video, is put at the margins of the screen, while the video of the students—normally with cameras off, so just their names—disappear. This mode of visualization implies that the speaker either looks just at his/her own presentation, or to his/her own image while talking, i.e., performing. A process that increases that one already traced by Rose, and so that the speaker looks at the images rather than at the audience, implicating maybe more confidence, but also that the performance is totally regulated by the slides without the input normally given by the audience presence. The image is the absolute protagonist of the lessons and takes all the space.

As regards the audience, in the distance learning the relationship of power between the speaker —or better, the image projected—and the students, is empowered through a mono-voice, a full-screen image displaying the truth, and the difficulties of interrupting due to the online modality. What is more, in this modality, there is not only an empowered relation of power, but very often a learning process quite impersonal. Indeed, as the students—but in general also the audience of an online seminar, lecture, or conference—put their camera off, it is not possible for the speaker—and for all the participants—to see and to look at the audience. There is in this sense neither perception of the efficacy of the discourse, nor a relation of communication, except that with a screen sharing images.

The last and most important element of Rose's scheme is the space of visual images' display. If it is true and evident also in this case that the space determines the performance, the question remains in which measure we can speak about space in the case of online virtual class, a space without bodies, relations, intersections.

What to do in order to not renounce to the classroom as a critical space of knowledge formation? If it is true that the pandemic is acting as a laboratory of acceleration and experimentation, we need to think to new methodologies, new didactics and learning processes and, above all, about the limits and possibilities opened by the visual, as "the implication is not then that we should abandon visual methods and techniques but find new ways of thinking them, with new sense of vision. A practice that must be imaginary" ^[13].

3.2.   Visual questions in virtual classroom: three cartographies of the "Mediterranean Complex"

I will now turn to three images we have used during the online course of geopolitics of migration during the academic year 2020–2021. Through these specific images—because as it matters "which stories tell stories" it also matters which visualities imagine other visualities, "as a practice of caring and thinking" ^[18]—we rethought and re-imagined the construction of the online lessons. As for critical geopolitics each geographical analysis is never a mere description, but instead a discursive narration of the world, a set of practices producing meanings, those narrative devices "have not only to be deconstructed but put in relation with praxis" ^[19]. Starting from this, we decided for a didactic methodology in which to place an image at the centre and from there develop not only the lesson, but also a question of critical geopolitics—so the image as an input and not as an output. At the end of the course, students presented their visual projects with the same methodology, i.e., by constructing a question around an image—a cartography, a video, a picture—and by analysing and deconstructing the interstices where the power of the dominant vision of the world are accumulates, made visible or invisible.

The first image is the artwork Scramble for Africa (2003) by the Nigerian Artist Yinka Shonibare, an image we used in the first part of the course about critical and creative cartography (Figure 1). Staging the partition of Africa during the Berlin conference of 1884–1885, the work shows the main imperialist powers represented by headless bodies sitting around a table on which a map of the African continent is drawn, gesticulating and arguing while one seems to be able to hear "this is mine, this is mine, this is mine". The absence of individual characteristics for each of the bodies, representing one of the 14 European powers present at the conference that determined the definitive imperial and colonial plundering of the African continent, seems to allude to the fact that there are no differences between one state and another. They are represented without a head because unreasonable, or rather a gratuitously violent rationality was that act of history. Yinka Shonibare explains about this artwork that "Theatricality is certainly a device in my work, it is a way of setting the stage; it is also a fiction— a hyper-real, theatrical device that enables you to re-imagine events from history… Scramble for Africa examines how history repeats itself […]" ^[20].

Figure 1.  Scramble for Africa, 2003, Yinka Shonibare, Image from National Museum of African Art—Smithsonian Institute, Fair Use. https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/shonibare/scramble.html.

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In one of the last lessons of the cartographic part of the geopolitics of migration course, we showed the students this image posing some questions: is this a cartography? If yes, which representation of the world is showing? Can we deconstruct the map? ^[21]. What followed was a collective reflection and debate with the students, on the one hand, on cartography as a text recording the world but also as a powerful means of imagination; on the other hand, on colonialism as a world-system, whose effects and power relations continue to govern the world, as it is visible in Mediterranean's migrations routes. What we have tried to get out, is the awareness that maps are powerful tool of imagination and creative processes of narration of the world, as in the case of this "interactive" map put into scene by Shonibare's artwork. Besides, this is exactly why "today the boundaries between the art and science of mapping, so long and so arbitrarily surveyed, charted and policed, are increasingly smudged and faded, and why the imaginative and projective potential of mappings has become so vitally present in contemporary life" ^[10].

The second image is a cover of the December 2019 issue of Il Manifesto, an Italian newspaper politically left-positioned and against the xenophobic right-rhetoric, published at the time of the clash between Captain Carola Rackete and the then Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini. An image that clearly wanted to be entirely in favour of the need for rescues at sea and against the xenophobic rhetoric of "close the ports!" that in that period more than ever determined the Italian political discourse. However, this image reproduces intrinsic relations of power and coloniality: here Carola Rackete is depicted in large size while she is surrounded by tiny figures of migrants at sea who try to climb on her braided hair, almost in an attempt to cling to an idea of Europe that only knows the name of the captain of the Mediterranean, while reducing the subjects of that crossing into mere numbers. We used this image in the second part of the course about the different geopolitical narratives in time and space—whose reference text is Ó Tuathail's The Geopolitics Reader ^[22]. What is wrong in this image? What power relations is this image—consciously or unconsciously—reproducing? In this case, the debate came out more spontaneously and with several interventions by the students, probably as it was a political reference of their contemporaneity in which they are more immersed and on which they wanted to debate their opinions. They immediately recognised the interstices in which power accumulates that we were referring to, and a reflection ensued on the power of dominant narratives with respect to which, even when we believe we are deconstructed subjects, we are so immersed that we continue to reproduce them.

The third and last image is a shot taken from the video Liquid Traces (2014) on the case of the boat of migrants abandoned at sea which has come to be known as the Left-to-die Boat (Figure 2). On the 27^th of March 2011, a Zodiac-style boat left the Libyan coast with the aim to reach in very few days Lampedusa, but the boat would never arrive in Sicily. Instead, it would drift for 14 days in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, watched from the other ships, and would make landfall back to Libya on the 10^th of April. Of the 72 people on board at the beginning of the crossing, only 9 survived: Bilal Yacoub Idris, Ghirma Halefom, Dan Haile Gebre, Abu Kurke Kebato, Mohammd Ahmed Ibrahim, Kabbadi Asfao Dadi, Elias Mohammed Kadi, Filmon Weldemichail Teklegergis, Mariam Moussa Jamal. Thanks to their testimony, the two scholars and activists Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani made this video documentary to denounce the necropolitics ^[23] acting in the geopolitical reason in the Mediterranean Sea, where killability is exercised without even touching people, but leaving them to die in the middle of the sea. What emerges from the reconstruction of the Left-to-Die Boat is a story of necropower, where the sea becomes an unwilling weapon; at the same time, a story of a violent map turned into a counter-narrative ^[24]. Indeed, by employing novel forms of visualization and spatial analysis, and by using sources of data such as GPS coordinates, the video documentary Liquid Traces reconstructs the counter-narrative of what happened on board that particular ship; by assembling the stories of the nine survivors with the liquid traces sedimented among the waves, it draws a counter-visuality of the "Mediterranean Complex". Since we used this image in the last part of the course about migrations in the Mediterranean Sea, we put at the centre of the discussion questions regarding somehow the entire path we had during the course: what kind of geopolitics is at work here? Where is power in this cartography and in which ways is it deconstructed? What can the ship of this sea-space as a crucial element for itself tell us about the contemporary capitalistic geopolitics acted by Fortress Europe?

Figure 2.  Image from the video documentary Liquid Traces. The Left-to-Die Boat Case (2014). Source: Forensic Architecture, Fair Use: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-left-to-die-boat.

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At the end of the course, students presented their own visual projects about a specific geopolitical case happened in the Mediterranean Sea. They enjoyed constructing PowerPoints with video documentary, pictures, drawings, cartographies, and extracts from TV series. As many of them were Erasmus Students, they shared visualities and counter-visualities materials from the Italian, Tunisian and Palestinian narratives. Moreover, during their presentation, the relationship of the power discourse overturned: as they were now the speakers, and the professors were the audience, they experimented from the other point of view the relationship with the image.

4.   Conclusions

This article was intended as a first contribution to a reflection on the changes in the didactic we are experiencing during the "Pandemic Laboratory", at a time when what we are witnessing is an exploit of the use of images in research presentations, seminars, conferences, as well as in teaching/learning processes. In order to do this, this article briefly presented a modality we experimented in the Geopolitics of migration course of the academic year 2020–2021 at the University of Palermo. A course during which we asked ourselves how to break down the limits dictated by the absence of the comfortable space of the classroom and the need to imagine new ways of constructing geographical knowledge through a screen. Indeed, if as Rose points out, in the relationship between geography and the visual, as well as in the visual presentation of geographical knowledge, the fundamental element that determines performance is space, we must ask ourselves what happens to space in online distance learning. In the wake of Rose's work ^[14], this article discussed which relationship we establish with images in the hyper-production experienced in distance learning, and how they govern teaching performance, from the point of view of the teacher and from the point of view of the student audience.

The methodology we attempted in our course was not only to use images—in the form of slides— to make geographical knowledge visible, but to use specific images by constructing around them a question that would allow the sharing and construction of collective knowledge and reflections, otherwise very difficult in the impersonal environment dictated by the needs of social distancing. At the end, this methodology and visual research allowed us to bring the lesson back—albeit in part—to its nature of construction of critics, even if in the absence of bodies, looks, bodily interaction and communication.

Furthermore, a main point to underline is that the interest is not in images in general, but into specific images that convey specific vision of the world. Indeed, following Haraway's suggestion, as it matters "which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts, as a practice of caring and thinking" ^[18], it also matters which visualities imagine other visualities. I suggest that the images briefly discussed in this article are those that compose the clash between visual and counter-visual in that specific space which is the "Mediterranean Complex". Indeed, while they make visible the necropolitical power of Fortress Europe contemporary geopolitics main narration, at the same time, they are cartographies of new embodied visions. By keeping in mind that narrations are powerful because of their ability to accumulate in the interstices, we must continuously question ourselves about the images we are using and producing: what are we—consciously or unconsciously—reproducing? what are we making visible? what are we leaving invisible?

To conclude, the main point of the necessity to imagine new practices in the knowledge field and to find new teaching/learning process, is related to the need of constructing critical knowledge. In other words, the deconstruction and decolonization of academic practices, whose spatial relations of power are getting worst during the pandemic with its social distancing. In this field, the most important lesson we can learn is that one by bell hooks, who unfortunately recently left this world: "the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy […]. Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom" ^[17].

In a world where the contact with the other is becoming the most dangerous thing, we need to rethink and reimagine our classroom as spaces—even if virtual—of creation of positive contagion: of ideas, of critical thoughts, of new visions.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.