My name is Simon Ferdinand (b.1989). I am an academic editor, supervisor, and publication consultant based in Amsterdam. I am also an interdisciplinary researcher.
Originally from Reading in the United Kingdom, I received my PhD (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam in 2017.
A committed wordsmith, I am very experienced in editing and supervising texts of all kinds. As a British academic working abroad, I am also used to helping non-native speakers to raise the quality of their writing in English.
My own research focuses on the politics and poetics of visual representation in geography, with reference to two areas: the relationship between geographical mapmaking and visual art, and historically marginal representations of the earth.
In addition to the three books described below, I have written a number of articles, chapters, and book reviews. I have also taught on a variety of subjects in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Warwick, Amsterdam University College, and the University of Amsterdam.
For more on me, visit www.simonferdinand.com.
MY BOOKS
Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity
University of Nebraska Press 2019
Over the last century, a growing number of visual artists have been captivated by the entwinements of beauty and power, truth and artifice, and fantasy and functionality that they perceive in geographical mapmaking. In this book, I analyze diverse map-based artworks alongside critical spatial theory, arguing that together they challenge myths of cartographic objectivity and the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable space.
“In this thoughtful analysis of ‘map art’ Simon Ferdinand offers an innovative interpretation of contemporary artworks that tests and reconfigures the challenges and opportunities posed by the transformation in global modernity of our lived world into lines and grids.”
—Sumathi Ramaswamy, author of Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe
“This is an important book on a theoretical level. By looking at recent technologies as a continuation of existing ontologies, Ferdinand goes beyond the hype around digital mapping.”
—Jess Bier, author of Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge
Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalisation
Jointly edited with Irene Villaescusa-Illán and Esther Peeren
Palgrave 2019
This volume challenges dominant imaginations of globalization by highlighting alternative visions of the globe, world, earth, or planet that abound in cultural, social, and political practice. In the contemporary context of intensive globalization, ruthless geopolitics, and unabated environmental exploitation, these “other globes” offer paths for thinking anew the relations between people, polities, and the planet. In revealing the variety of ways in which the global has been—and might be—imagined, the fourteen contributions underline that there is no neutral, natural, or universal way of inhabiting the global.
“In an era in which it has never felt more pressing that we explore our relations with the earth, interrogate our imaginations of the globe, and parse planetary thinking, Other Globes expertly assembles a series of empirically rich and theoretically astute contributions that do just this. As we struggle to make sense of the contemporary condition of life on Earth, the diverse geographies and histories of Other Globes offer an important guide. This is indeed a collection for our times.”
—Harriet Hawkins, author of For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds
“Other Globes offers a compelling interdisciplinary and remarkably transnational argument for the notion that the view from nowhere is also one of many views from somewhere. It aims not so much to do away with the ‘global’ as provincialize it.”
—Benjamin Lazier, author of Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture
Heterotopia and Globalisation in the Twenty-First Century
Jointly edited with Irina Souch and Daan Wesselman
Routledge 2020
Can heterotopia help us make sense of globalisation? Against reductive rhetorics proclaiming that the world is becoming one, this volume shows how contemporary globalising processes are riven by heterotopian tension and complexities. Whereas the concept of globalisation is frequently seen as a tumultuous undifferentiation of cultures and spaces, a heterotopia signals the spatial articulation of a discursive order, manifesting its own distinct logics and categories in ways that refract or disturb prevailing paradigms. Despite the apparent contradiction between these concepts, this volume shows how they intersect in the cultural present. Together, the thirteen contributions argue that digital technologies, climate change, migration, and other globalising phenomena are giving rise to a heterotopian multiplicity of discursive spaces, which overlap and clash with one another in contemporary culture.