Lawrence Prelli, Department of Communication at University of New Hampshire, presents "Visualizing Facts and Metaphors in the U.S.-Canada Gulf of Maine Boundary Case," on Tuesday, Feb. 22, at 4:10 in KJ Auditorium.
In 1984 a chamber of the World Court divided United States and Canadian jurisdiction over commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Maine. This talk presents the U.S. political rationale for taking the case to court and the unprecedented "resource conservation" argument central to its legal strategy for winning jurisdiction over Georges Bank. The resource conservation argument advanced the principle that management of living resources could be improved if international legal boundaries corresponded with natural boundaries that divided discrete ecological systems.
Prelli examines graphical displays of the facts warranting application of this principle to the Gulf of Maine. The Gulf of Maine is seen as an area divided by a natural boundary between Georges Bank and Scotian Shelf ecological regimes, with the Georges Bank regime (and the fish stocks living within it) on the US "side." Prelli shows how visual structures rhetorically constituted this perspective so that metaphorically generated associations about "boundaries in the sea" were seen as factual attributes of the Gulf's marine environment. His presentation explains how sophisticated graphical devices used in scientific or expert demonstrations not only display information and other data, but enact a visual rhetoric that subtly constitutes boundaries between facts and fictions, between evidential grounds and metaphors.
Sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs in conjunction with the Sophomore Seminar "Rhetoric, Science, and the Environment."
