Dr. Daniel Dumas

Daniel Dumas was a member of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society’s ProEnviron doctoral program from 2018 to 2025. He obtained his PhD in geography from LMU Munich in 2025. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography.

His earlier work focused on critically analyzing representations of Indigenous peoples and geographies in Canada. His current project focuses on the work and contributions of German polar explorer and geographer Ernst Herrmann who led several expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic in the 1920s and 1930s. The project seeks to analyze Herrmann’s impact on contributing to the visualization—both real and imagined—of the Arctic and Antarctic in the mechanical age of polar research. As a result, this research will contribute to a better understanding of how advanced transportation technology, such as aircraft, and visual technologies, such as color film and photography, created new environmental imaginaries and imagined geographies of the polar regions.

Selected Publications:

• “Making Brave Space: Beading, Reconciliation, and Urban Indigenous Geographies.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, no. 62 (2024): 39–64. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijcs-2023-0011.
• “Place Them on a Stamp: Inuit, Banal Colonialism, and the ‘Pioneer Experiment’ of the High Arctic Relocations.” Political Geography, no. 105 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102919.
• with Carolin Maertens. “Spaces of Living in Transformation: Sights, Sounds and Sensations of Munich’s River and Slaughterhouse Districts.” Global Environment 16, no. 2 (2023): 386–99. https://doi.org/10.3197/ge.2023.160208.
• with Eveline Dürr and Regine Keller. “Irritations and Unforeseen Consequences of the Urban: Debating Natures, Politics and Timescapes.” Global Environment 16, no. 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3197/ge.2023.160201.
• “Pipeline Dreams and Nightmares: Media Representation of Indigenous Peoples and the Trans Mountain Expansion Project.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, no. 73 (2023): 32–59.
• “Problematic Postage: Canada’s Claim to the Arctic through a Postage Stamp.” Arcadia, no. 25 (2020). https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/9064.