The parts and the whole: 'Earthrise' and the politics of seeing everything from nowhere
hosted by Professor
Nina Hall
Joanne Yao
Queen Mary University of London
The first Earth Day in 1970 had many inspirations – Rachel Carson's compelling Silent Spring, antiwar student movements across the US, and the devastation of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill – but one photo is often credited with the emergence of a new global environmental consciousness in the late 1960s. Earthrise was snapped by astronaut Bill Anders as the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbited the moon, and it depicts a blue and white planet floating in the blackness of space. While it highlights earth's vulnerability to environmental destruction, the picture also showed us a different vision of ourselves. As Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman reflected, "We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality… this must be what God sees."
In this seminar, Joanne Yao explores the abstracted view of earth from above as an integrated whole and the politics of a whole humanity that this God-like view engendered. From this position, the 1968 moment becomes the culmination of a longer quest to know the earth in its entirety through scientific exploration into the unknown, which was often entangled with histories of colonialism and racialized and gendered exclusions.
The seminar will explore the utopian imaginaries this view of earth inspired in how humans could rise above parochial interests to unite as one against the cold nothingness of space, but it also traces the silences and erasures that enabled what Donna Haraway calls the "god trick of seeing everything from nowhere."
This event is part of the Festival of Ecological Imagination, organised by Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe, The University of Bologna and Le Serre dei Giardini Margherita. To learn more about the festival, visit the
festival website.
Joanne Yao, Reader in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London
Joanne Yao joined Queen Mary in 2019. Previously, she taught at Durham University and the LSE, where she completed her PhD in 2017. In addition, she has worked in the US public sector and for international nongovernmental organizations including CARE International.
Her research centers on environmental history and politics, historical international relations, international hierarchies and orders, and the development of early international organizations. Her first book, The Ideal River (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines the construction of the ‘ideal river' in the European geographical imagination and the establishment of the first international organizations. Joanne's next project focuses on the history of Antarctica and early outer space exploration.
Joanne was also one of three editors of Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Volume 43 (2014-2015) and is currently a member of Millennium's Board of Trustees.
If you cannot attend the event in person and wish to watch the session online, please register below:
