• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.557-574
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• 2013

The paper examines the recent criticism from various viewpoints on landscape research in 'New cultural geography' focusing on the representation and duplicity of landscape as one of the key theoretical basis of the landscape school. The paper argues that landscape theories in new cultural geography should be considered as what is constantly changing over time and composed of various theoretical and genealogical elements rather than internally homogeneous, fixed, and closed system of knowledge. Through the recent 'phenomenological turn' of geography, landscape researchers explores a possibility of alternative approach to the existing theories and methods, which is so called NRT(Non-representational theory). The research objectives of the paper is to examine the theoretical and practical implications of such significant criticisms, which put emphasis on the idea of landscape as performance and practice rather than landscape as representation in cultural geography.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.613-632
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• 2016

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene challenges public understanding of nature as a pure and singular entity removed from society, as the diagnosis confirms the earth-changing force of humans. In geography, the nature-society divide has been critically interrogated long before the diagnosis of the Anthropocene, developing several ways of theorizing nature-society relations. This paper introduces a new frontier for such theoretical endeavors: more-than-human geography. Inspired by the material and performative turn in geography and the social sciences around the 2000s, more-than-human geographers have sought to re-engage with the livingness of the world in the study of nature-society relations. Drawing on actor-network theory, non-representational theory (NRT) and vitalism, they have developed innovative ways of thinking about and relating to nature through the key concepts of 'nonhuman agency' and 'affect'. While more-than-human geography has been extensively debated and developed in recent Euro-American scholarship on cultural and economic geography, it has so far received limited attention in Korean geographical studies on nature. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing the key concepts and seminal work of more-than-human geography. I first outline four theoretical strands through which nature-society relations are perceived in geography. I then offer an overview of more-than-human geography, discussing its theoretical foundations and considering ontologies, epistemologies, politics and ethics associated with nature-society relations. Then, I compare more-than-human geography with political ecology, which is the mainstream critical approach in contemporary environmental social sciences. I would argue that more-than-human geography further challenges and develops political ecology through its heightened attention to the affective capacity of nonhumans and the methodological ethos of doing a careful political ecology. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of more-than-human geography for Korean studies on nature-society relations.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.305-323
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• 2015

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the paradigm shifts of landscape studies in Anglophone cultural and historical geography. By analyzing the work of the Berkley School in the 1950s and 1960s, the advance of humanistic geography in the 1970s, the revival of cultural geography in the 1980s ("new cultural geography"), and the recent development of non-representational geography, this paper demonstrates that the paradigms of landscape studies in Anglophone cultural and historical geography have been changed. By giving buoyancy to the concept of 'Affect'-a kind of 'spatio-bodily-magnetic relation'-as an essence of non-representational geography, I provide an easy way for understanding the implications of non-representational geography. In addition to this, re-conceptualising Non-Representational Theory (NRT) based non-representational geography as 'Kyung-Chi Jirihak' in Korean lexicon context, it is suggested that what the directions of landscape studies of cultural and historical geography of Korea should be and how it can be set up in the paradigm shifts.