Air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings can account for a third or more of the carbon footprint for a typical scholar or university. This symposium employed a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference approach that reduced greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 100. For more on “academia’s biggest dirty little secret” and the rationale behind this conference model, as well as details on how to coordinate online events of this sort, see our White Paper / Practical Guide.
This conference, which took place in June of 2018, is now over. However, feel free to view the talks and read the Q&A sessions, as well as to cite both.
A troubling paradox lies at the heart of ecomedia studies: those of us who study and teach about the intersection of ecological issues and non-print media also recognize that the production, consumption, and circulation of media texts take a massive toll on the Earth’s environment, an issue well documented by media scholars. In other words, as ecomedia scholars and environmental filmmakers, we must admit that our own media production, consumption, and research practices — which are felt disproportionately across communities and cultures — make us complicit in the ever-escalating global environmental crisis. Yet if we are to better understand the vital role that film and media play in reflecting, responding to, and shaping public attitudes about the relationships between the human and non-human worlds, as well as different human communities, we must embrace this paradox. In this first-ever ASLE online symposium, we will collectively situate and define ecomedia studies and its relationship to environmental humanities, film and media studies, and cultural studies through a series of virtual presentations and conversations.
We all know that conferences are not just about unidirectional dissemination of ideas, but about intellectual exchange and scholarly community building. In that spirit, our ecomedia conference will be piloting multiple opportunities for connecting remotely with your colleagues over the course of the conference. As such, we are working to connect people at great distances around common ideas and through digital experiences. There are four clusters of activities that are currently being planned: Monday evening game nights, Tuesday night film watching groups, Wednesday night book discussion groups, and Thursday night happy hours. Details on each cluster of activities, as well as information about how to sign up, can be found below (scroll down for these Social Activities).
In order to commemorate this event, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) has created a special collection of articles exploring Ecomedia in the Anthropocene.
OPENING TALKS (visit panel)
Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. She worked for several years in the German film and television industry as production manager, assistant producer, and later scriptwriter before earning her PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. Her current research explores the theoretical intersections of cognitive cultural studies and ecocriticism with a special focus on affect and emotion. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (U of Texas P, 2014), the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), and the co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (with Sylvia Mayer, Winter 2014). Her most recent book, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2017.
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications include Timeshift: On Video Culture (Routledge, 1991), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (Palgrave, 1993), Digital Aesthetics (Sage, 1998), Simulation and Social Theory (SAGE, 2001), The Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2004), EcoMedia (Rodopi, 2005), The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technology from Prints to Pixels (MIT Press, 2014) and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Duke University Press, 2017). Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his research focuses on the history and philosophy of media, political aesthetics, media art history and ecocriticism.
PANELS
(To view talks and Q&A sessions, click on the panel title. Select the speaker’s name for abstract.)
1. Ecohorror on and off the Screen
H(it)ler came from the Swamp: Bayou ‘Hicks,’ Ecohorror, and the Rise of Facism in America, Sara Crosby
Raw (2016): Ecohorror and Appetite in the Anthropocene, Kristen Angierski
A Monstrosity of Scales: The Shifting Spatiotemporalities and Anthropocentric Realities of Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, Jeffrey Marchand
Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror, Christy Tidwell
The Urban Ecology of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Caren Irr
Shooting Location, Cine-Hydrology, and The Revenant, Mario Trono
Wilderness and “Wilderpeople”: Ecotourist Adventures and the Marketing of Survival in Post-Colonial Film, Amelia Chaney
3. Global Politics & Narratives
Multi-Species in an Emergency: Reshaping rural communities after the Argentinean 2001 Crisis in Albertina Carri’s film La Rabia, Valeria Meiller
Still the Water: Tension Between Cinematic Animism and Post-Anthropocentrism in Global Eco Art Cinema, Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn
Nature as Mystical Refuge in Reha Erdem Films, Ekin Gündüz Özdemirci
Conceptualizing Speculative Aesthetics in Asian Ecocinema, Kiu-wai Chu
4. Disaster, Catastrophe, & Crisis in SF
Beyond Dystopia, Apocalypse, and Techno-fantasy: Imagining Sustainability Transitions in Science Fiction Futures, Jeffrey Barber
Climatic Catastrophe and Ecocritical Awakening in Ship Breaker and The Water Wars, Saba Pirzadeh
Hollywood’s Lifeboat Ethics, Graig Uhlin
The Extinction-haunted Setting of The Monster that Challenged the World (1957), Bridgitte Barclay
Silent Running and the Metaphor of Spaceship Earth, Matthew Thompson
Chistianity, Climate Change, and Cinema, Everett Hamner
The Future is Wild: Speculative Evolution and the Post-Anthropocene, Anne Schmalstig
Naturalizing White Supremacy in Low-Budget Shark Attack Movies, Carter Soles
White Flight from Planet Earth: Inverted Quarantine in Interstellar, Michelle Yates
Performative Deferral and Climate Justice in Parable of the Sower: The Opera, Michael Horka
Dogs and Eco-Trauma: The Making of a Monster in White God, Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
“Neigh Way, Jose”: BoJack Horseman’s Rejection of Cute Animality, James Cochran
‘We Were Being Changed and Made Part of Their World’: Complicating the Human and Animal with Phase IV, Isaac Rooks
Wilderness and Cat Protagonists in Turkish, American, British, and Italian Movies of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, Fazila Derya Agis
Black Lodge Anthropocene: Twin Peaks Ecomedia, Andy Hageman
Give It Time: Reframing Place Through Slow TV, Amanda Hagood
Green Hearts, Gray Hands: Rethinking Hydrocarbons in Contemporary Film and Ecocriticism, Bart Welling
Dynasty and #NoDAPL: The Messy Environmental Politics of 2010s Oil Soaps, Michaela Rife
Petro-modernity and Petro-temporality in Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, Kyle Sittig
Environmental Degradation and Re-greening: Ecomusicology study of the Niger Delta Region of Nigera, Olusegon Titus
To Instill a Love for Them: Plant Cinematography and Botanical Ethics, John Ryan
The Nonhuman Gazes Back: Ecological Potentials in Pixarvolts, Mother!, The Ornithology, and iAnimal, Inez Zhou
Miyazaki, Seriously: What Would It Mean to Put Anime into the Teaching Canon of Ecomedia?, Anthony Lioi
Open Educational Resources and Ecomedia Pedagogy: Surveying the Landscape, Dan Platt
The Ecology of Media Objects: Teaching Ecomedia with the Ecomedia/sphere Heuristic, Antonio Lopez
12. Art Ecomedia
New Critical Realities: Indigenous Filmmaking in the Time of Climate Change, Lisa Bloom
Onscreen Pleasure and Off-screen Guilt, Erin Espelie
Coding Climate Change: Digital Aesthetics and the Legacy of Lucas Gusher, Lisa FitzGerald
World-Building: The Unnatural Geologies of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, Susan Ballard
Ecodata — Ecomedia — Ecoaesthetics, or: Technologies of the Ecological After the Anthropocene, Yvonne Volkart, Rasa Smite, Aline Veillat
Performing Precariousness on Thin Ice: Ecomedia and the Arctic Climate Crisis, Senta Sanders
Fly Fishing in the Digital Age: From “Eastern Rises” to #KeepEmWet, Cory Willard
Going Rogue: A Material Feminist Reading of AltUsNatParkService as Environmental Rhetoric and Ecomedia’s New Resistance Movement, Amy Propen
15. Ecomedia Concept and Theory
Inscriptive Energetics: Climate Change, Energy, Inscription, Nathaniel Otjen
Eco-sexual Imaginations of the Earth, Miriam Tola
16. Indigenous Lands and Visual Rhetoric in Ecomedia I (pre-formed by the Indigenous Ecocriticism SIG)
Black Bodies, White Earth: Mapping a Modern Aeta Consciousness Toward an Ecocinema of the Philippines, Rogelio Garcia
Living/Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button, Matthew Holtmeier
Decolonizing Drones: Aerial Media in the #NoDAPL Struggle, Emily Roehl
17. Indigenous Lands and Visual Rhetoric in Ecomedia II (pre-formed by the Indigenous Ecocriticism SIG)
Decolonially Queer: Indigenous Ecocriticism, Queer Ecologies, and Multispecies Relationships in Recent Latin American Film and Art, Vera Coleman
Eco-Testimonies and Eco-Memories in Olosho: Placing Indigenous Ecomedia within the De-/Coloniality of Nature, Felix Mantz
Inal Mama: Subjugated Indigenous Knowledges and the Sacredness of the Coca Leaf, Abigail Perez Aguilera
Praise Your Capacity: Oceania, the Anthropocene, and Craig Santos Perez’s Videopoems, Rebecca Hogue
Cinematic Imaginaries of Gender and the Environment: An Examination of the Work of Hayao Miyazaki, Ramya Tella
The Wild Bunch: Women’s Survival Narratives, Virginia Luzon-Aguado
Social Activities
Discussions are currently ongoing for other film screenings and art events, and additional information about those will be forthcoming. Feel free to contact Shannon Davies Mancus at shannonmancus@mines.edu if you have a brilliant proposition that you’d like to see added to the roster.
Happy hours: Imagine the conference bar experience, but curated so that you can not only catch up with old friends but also connect with new colleagues who share your interests. On each of the three Thursday nights that occur during the conference, happy hours will occur over Google hangouts. Want to reconnect with someone you enjoyed meeting at a previous conference? See a presentation that particularly piqued your interest, and want to get to know the presenter better? Looking to network with other scholars that share your particular interests?
Follow the links to sign up for the opening conference happy hour on Thursday, June 14th; the mid-conference happy hour on Thursday, June 21st; and/or the closing conference happy hour on June 28th. When you sign up, you will be asked about your interests, time zone, and names of people you’d be particularly interested in being in a group with. I will arrange groups of five people based on points of intellectual connection, and groups can determine what time they will virtually assemble based on time zone.
Film screenings: Film screenings will take place utilizing the easy-to-use platform Rabbit. Rabbit allows for multiple people to watch and comment on a film at the exact same time. Heard about Okja, but haven’t seen it yet? Been meaning to get around to watching Before the Flood, but haven’t been able to convince anyone in your life to sit down for two hours of Leonardo DiCaprio talking about climate change? Watch these films and others with other ecomedia scholars who might have unique insights about the themes of the films or ways to productively use them in a classroom. Sign up for the June 19th screening here , and the June 26th screening here.
Games: Games are increasingly being studied by ecomedia scholars and utilized in classroom settings to explore environmental themes. On Monday, June 18th and Monday, June 25th we’ll be convening virtual groups to play The Mercury Game. Sign up here. Additionally, we’re looking for people to play environmentally themed video games on Twitch, or to organize local meetups to livestream the playing of relevant board games. If you are interested, email shannonmancus@mines.edu.
Book groups: Did you read a book in preparation for your presentation that you’re dying to talk about with colleagues? Do you want motivation for checking off a book that’s on your summer reading list? Are you looking to expose yourself to texts that are being read widely in the ecomedia community. Propose a virtual book group at this link. Book meetings will occur on Wednesdays or at a mutually agreed upon-on time.
We are looking forward to hearing your ideas and connecting with you throughout the conference!