{"id":17766,"date":"2018-04-03T14:25:01","date_gmt":"2018-04-03T21:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io\/?page_id=17766"},"modified":"2018-06-12T09:33:49","modified_gmt":"2018-06-12T16:33:49","slug":"abstracts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/?page_id=17766","title":{"rendered":"Abstracts"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

A CLOCKWORK GREEN: ECOMEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

AN ASLE-SPONSORED, NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL SYMPOSIUM<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>
\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

ABSTRACTS & BIOS<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

[easy-share buttons=”facebook,twitter,linkedin,mail” counters=0 native=”no” image=https:\/\/live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/01D_UCEN_010-3-2.jpg url=https:\/\/live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io\/?page_id=3823 facebook_text=Share twitter_text=Tweet\u00a0linkedin_text=Link text=”Check out all the speakers\u00a0at UCSB’s highly experimental, nearly carbon-free conference:\u00a0Climate Change: Views from the Humanities!”]<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Inscriptive Energetics: Climate Change, Energy, Inscription<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Nathaniel Otjen<\/p>\n

Climate change, as scholars of the humanities and social sciences often observe, is difficult to engage with and theorize. Rather than admit theoretical defeat, however, this presentation proposes that thinking climate change through the framework of energy offers a productive way into the concept, a way of thinking through<\/em>, with<\/em>, and against <\/em>anthropogenic climate change. As I will argue, climate change is an interconnected constellation -\u2014 an assemblage \u2014 of shifting energies. Climate change as energy inscribes itself onto material bodies, writing itself into the geologic record, leaving its imprint in plants, and stamping its presence in the flesh of the human and more-than-human. I call this ability of climate energetics to inscribe earthly bodies inscriptive energetics<\/em>. The material traces of climate change, or inscriptive energetics, can be read on<\/em>, in<\/em>, and through <\/em>bodies.<\/p>\n

Writers and artists, among other ecomedia practitioners, have considered the inscriptive energetics imprinted upon human, more-than-human, and material bodies. Lynda V. Mapes explores the material manifestations of inscriptive energetics in her most recent book of nonfiction titled Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak <\/em>(2017). Seeking to tell a new narrative of print ecomedia, Mapes discovered that \u201cyou could tell the story of climate change \u2014 and more \u2014 through a single, beloved living thing, a tree\u201d (17). Mapes learns to read the inscriptive energetics buried within a century-old oak tree, examining the marks left upon the tree\u2019s rings and leaves. Witness Tree <\/em>offers a point of departure for this branching study of inscriptive energetics. As such, this presentation makes two primary contributions to the environmental humanities. First, it introduces the concept of inscriptive energetics, offering a theory of climate change based upon the interrelated study of energy, materiality, and ecomedia. Second, it provides a way to conceptualize and understand the material impacts of climate change.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>H<\/span><\/span>ow We Feel about (Not) Eating Animals:\u00a0<\/span>Ecomedia, Emotion, and Vegan Studies<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexa Weik von Mossner<\/p>\n

The talk draws connections between two emerging research fields within ecomedia studies and the environmental humanities more generally: vegan studies and cognitive ecocriticism. Vegan studies scholars such as Laura Wright and Sara Salih have commented on the affective dimen\u00adsions of our complicated and ideologically fraught relationship to meat and to the animals that are slaughtered to obtain it. In her talk, Weik von Mossner argues that a cognitive ecocritical approach drawing on the insights of affective neuroscience and cognitive ethology can complement the cultural studies side of vegan studies by turning our attention to the ways in which media texts invite us to feel<\/em> about animals, food, and the relationship between the two. Activist videos and documentary films have often been credited for turning people vegan through graphic depictions of animal suffering that evoke empathic distress and eco-horror. Located on the other end of the affective spectrum are the cookbooks, food blogs and practical guides that aim to make a vegan lifestyle attractive by engaging us aesthetically and evoking positive emotions such as desire. The talk explores these different affective strategies in different types of media and comments on their potential usefulness in persuading resistant audiences to change their attitudes and behaviors toward nonhuman others and their own food.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>The Anthropos<\/em> in the Anthropocene<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Sean Cubitt<\/p>\n

Hannah Arendt thought of the astronaut as the physical realisation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, ‘the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him’ (Between Past and Future<\/em>, 272). Eco-critical moves against anthropocentrism similarly cannot but come to the figure of the anthropos<\/em>, now enshrined as an epochal geological force. Our world and time is irreducibly synthetic, not only as artifice of human action but as synthesis of the human and natural forces, a synthesis which however evidences the rift between them. It bears repeating that there is no single Humanity in play: racism, colonialism, gender oppression and capitalism shatter any concept of species-being, and name degrees of responsibility for and vulnerability to this new synthetic planet. But even in this synthesis we must not discard the discrete functions of the human, just as we must accept the alienation of a strictly non-human nature, as Malm has argued (The Progress of this Storm<\/em>). The words ‘we’ and ‘our’ in this abstract are then elements of a necessarily critical analysis. ‘We’ is a project of construction. This paper suggests some of the challenges, and some of the intellectual tools, that environmentalist politics needs to develop to create a ‘we’ capable of action on the planetary scale.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Nature as Mystical Refuge in Reha Erdem Films<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Ekin G\u00fcnd\u00fcz \u00d6zdemirci<\/p>\n

2017-\u00ad\u20102018 Fellow, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, Munich Beykent University, Istanbul<\/p>\n

ekingunduz@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Environmental representations in Turkish films have emerged in parallel with the development of social realistic narratives in Turkish film history. The collaborative labour relationship between human and non-\u00ad\u2010human nature was mostly problematized in the frame of social and economic problems in films made between 1960 and 1980.<\/p>\n

We can observe the formation of a new ecological approach in some Turkish films produced after 1990\u2019s, in the period that is also known as New Turkish Cinema. Different than the early films that referred to environmental issues by centring upon human interests and needs, these recent films more often don\u2019t directly feature environmental themes, however they bring on an emotional and reflective approach to human non-\u00ad\u2010human relations.<\/p>\n

As an example of this new approach, this work examines the portrayal of human non-\u00ad\u2010human relations in the films of internationally acclaimed Turkish filmmaker Reha Erdem. In contrast to early social realistic narratives, Erdem\u2019s films put forward individual encounters and conflicts with nature. His films characterize non-\u00ad\u2010human nature by appointing it a visual weight and a symbolic meaning, turn it into a kind of mystical refuge from the harsh realities of human made world, in other words, from the human degradation.<\/p>\n

I propose that, Turkish environmental politics increasingly threatening living areas since 1990\u2019s, especially in big cities like Istanbul where natural and cultural identity is damaged progressively, has encouraged the rise of an eco-\u00ad\u2010 philosophy in the films particularly made by filmmakers from urban areas.<\/p>\n

I consider this eco-\u00ad\u2010philosophical approach and discuss the qualities of it in the framework of environmental problems in Turkey and the repression of civilian reactions to that.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Raw\u00a0<\/em>(2016): Ecohorror and Appetite in the Anthropocene<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Kristen Angierski<\/p>\n

Raw<\/em>\u2014Julia Ducournau\u2019s horror film best known for causing fainting at film festivals\u2014is designed to make your stomach turn. The plot centers a lifelong vegetarian Justine who, at first, refuses to participate in her veterinary school\u2019s bloody hazing rituals involving the consumption of animal flesh. But ultimately, like Eve, she eats. This act awakens a darkness in Justine: an unquenchable appetite for animals\u2014human animals too.<\/p>\n

The film is a meditation on \u201cprimal hungers,\u201d the animality of the human, the violence of women\u2019s coming-of-age (a revolting pubic hair removal scene comes to mind). But Raw <\/em>also has much to offer as a piece of ecohorror vis-\u00e0-vis its combination of ecological awareness and the tropes of body horror. Raw <\/em>might even reasonably be classed as \u201ccli-fi.\u201d For it is impossible to discuss the ethics of consumption without acknowledging the ecological disaster that is factory farming: footage of which can also instigate nausea, fainting, horror. Is the factory farm the ultimate arena of ecohorror\u2014a space that blends ecological devastation with profound cruelty, perverse gore, and an almost unconquerable desire to look away\u2014a push\/pull of fascination and disgust? What can this affective mode\u2014disgust and horror\u2014do? Is there an environmentalist politics of nausea? For this symposium on ecomedia, I am most interested in thinking through, with the help of Sarah Ahmed\u2019s The Cultural Politics of Emotion<\/em>, the ways in which the \u201cviscerality\u201d of films like Raw <\/em>might be a starting place for ecological ethics, especially in an age of potential environmental collapse (sometimes called the Anthropocene) brought on in part by that impossibly complex phenomenon: appetite. Which affective, ethical, activist, appetitive doors do revolting ecomedia open\u2014and is it only to let the blood out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Cinematic Imaginaries of Gender and the Environment: An Examination of the Work of Hayao Miyazaki<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Ramya K Tella<\/p>\n

Through his cinema, Hayao Miyazaki <\/em>has explored cultural <\/em>and socio-technical imaginaries <\/em>that have led to varying interpretations of natural and built environments. However, the importance of Miyazaki’s contribution to an understanding of environmental discourses is especially significant when viewed in the context of his portrayal of female protagonists; key examples include Princess Mononoke<\/em>, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind <\/em>and Spirited Away<\/em>. In these films, the protagonists engage with themes of modernisation-mechanisation<\/em>, weaponisation<\/em>, and overconsumption <\/em>respectively, which this paper\/presentation examines, through the employment of a nuanced socio-cultural imagery. The narratives of the characters resonate a strong attachment to nature and feminist practice; they each contribute to an understanding of ecofeminism <\/em>that is attentive to the history and needs of the present <\/em>citizen. This paper argues that the performances of socio-historical and environmental narratives by Miyazaki\u2019s protagonists has the potential to travel and be understood in contexts outside of Japan- specifically, in the Global South.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>World-building: The Unnatural Geologies of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Susan Ballard<\/p>\n

In Christchurch New Zealand in September 2010 the earth gave one of its necessary shudders. As the energy shock reached a peak ground acceleration of 2.2G many of us could not help but pay attention. Amidst the long sequence of aftershocks, Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding made recordings of the earth as it settled into a pattern of movement. In the interactive installation Geology <\/em>(2015) Haines and Hinterding use these recordings to offer a sublime immersion in a dynamic land formed by relations between humans, our living systems, and the planet. In the interactive world of Geology <\/em>(2015) dimensionality and duration determine how we conduct ourselves. In a Kinect space delineated by geometry and motion our body hits the screen and we are in. Reminding us that all geology, all matter requires witnessing of some kind. Earthquakes are natural circuits of release, their impacts last on in our bodies through what New Zealand media theorist Zita Joyce calls \u201cbody energies\u201d where the residual energy of the earthquake becomes an affective way of knowing a place. Haines and Hinterding entice us to use our bodies to navigate through a ecomedia world made both familiar and abstract. This world-building is perfectly natural; as if we are inhabiting the drawings that map the underground worlds explored by Athanasius Kircher in Mundus Subterraneus <\/em>we sense the humming energy of the rocks. There is a third layer to the work. A third world hovering on top of its antipodes. It seems to be an unstable world of timber, shaken and fractured. We suddenly inhabit the perspective of the rock, no longer a human sized body we slam ourselves against the edges. We rain down on the timber, the geometries resist and shatter. We are inside and back out. The energy folds and creases across the land and we are floating, witnessing a beautiful collapse. This essay suggests that for Haines and Hinterding living amidst the media geologies of the Anthropocene is just the beginning.<\/p>\n

Biography:<\/p>\n

Dr. Susan Ballard is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who teaches Art History and Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong where she is also the co-\u00ad\u2010director of the C3P: Centre for Critical Creative Practice. Su’s research is concerned with the ways in which art intersects with big ideas about the environment, technology, and cultural politics. Recent essays have examined artistic negotiations of ecological transformation, species extinction, and natural disasters. Through collaborative partnerships and projects she facilitates discussions of the role of creative practice in the age of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>The\u00a0Extinction-haunted Setting of The Monster that Challenged the World<\/em> (1957)\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Bridgitte Barclay<\/p>\n

The Monster That Challenged the World <\/em>(1957) is part of a science fiction-horror subgenre reflecting extinction fears. A number of films feature prehistoric animals in unknown landscapes (uncharted islands or new planets, for instance). These films engage with extinction discourses of the era \u2013 the loss of the American west and certain American species, the growing popular science of prehistoric life, and new fears of atomic-induced human extinction. The Monster That Challenged the World<\/em> reflects these, as well as the already-haunted real-world landscape of its setting \u2013 The Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is a man-made environmental catastrophe that rehydrated an ancient lake bed and eventually creating an apocalyptic setting that foreshadowed human extinction. The film reflects a longing for natural spaces that is, in \u201cdeclensionist\u201d narratives as Ursula K. Heise notes, \u201cintimately linked to a foreboding sense of its looming destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill McKibben asserts in Eaarth <\/em>that humans in our current sixth extinction are as settlers on an unknown planet, writing, \u201cThe world hasn\u2019t ended, but the world as we know it has \u2013 even if we don\u2019t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live on that old planet\u2026. It\u2019s a different place. A different planet.\u201d This resonates with these midcentury narratives of extinction-haunted landscapes, as well.\u00a0 Given this, re-reading mid-20th<\/sup> century sf-horror films about de-extinct creatures in unexplored natural spaces (on Earth and in space) can inform our understanding of extinction- haunted landscapes, including our current one. The Monster that Challenged the World<\/em> reawakens the past extinct and foreshadows the future extinct in both setting and monster, and framing the film as eco-horror emphasizes not only the creature-feature fun of its original intent but also emphasizes the film\u2019s haunted setting, a real-world horror that continues into present day.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Beyond Dystopia, Apocalypse and Techno-fantasy: Imagining Sustainability Transitions in Science Fiction Futures<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Barber<\/p>\n

This presentation will explore the challenge in science fiction film to envision and inspire engagement in transitions to a sustainable future. Over past decades a growing number of films have used climate change and other environmental crises as dramatic narrative frames, some to provoke alarm, concern and engagement, others simply using these issues as a topical background action vehicle. In many if not most of these stories the future is dystopic, apocalyptic or conveniently resolving current crises through dramatic techno-fantasy breakthroughs e.g., the Replicator of Star Trek <\/em>or the ability to colonize and start anew on other worlds. What we do not often see are thoughtful visions of strategies and struggles involved in the kind of socio-cultural, political and personal transitions that could lead to what has been<\/p>\n

described as a \u201csustainable future\u201d. Understandably most films today are constrained by the risk-averse formulas of audience preference and return on investment as well as a consumer culture permeated by neoliberal norms. Today the science fiction and fantasy genre is flush with libertarian tropes celebrating vigilante heroes and violence in contrast to stories imagining the kind of future world, relationships and experience we would hopefully like to see emerge. While such visions and narratives do not easily fit into the expected action vehicles identified with \u201cscience fiction\u201d, this does not prevent writers and filmmakers from moving across other genres and conventions to develop stories exploring the kinds of challenges and possibilities involved in sustainability transitions, i.e., social imaginaries of how humanity manages to survive and evolve in overcoming the kinds of threats and inequalities, political quagmires, and lack of hope which often drive audiences to the cinema to escape.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Climatic Catastrophe and Ecocritical Awakening in Ship Breaker<\/em> and The Water Wars<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Saba Pirzadeh<\/p>\n

Environmental crises, such as global warming, climate change, resource depletion, desertification, and species extinction, are increasing in intensity, leading to the proliferation of young adult novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker <\/em>(2010) and Cameron Stracher’s The Water Wars <\/em>(2011) that depict dystopian worlds where environmental catastrophes inflict severe physical and psycho-emotive harm on adolescents as depicted by the depraved lives of the novels\u2019 protagonists Nailer and Vera. The significance of Ship Breaker <\/em>and The Water Wars <\/em>lies in their projection of climate change and resource depletion as results of capitalism, industrialization, and environmental exploitation. Employing an ecocritical lens to analyze Ship Breaker <\/em>and The Water Wars<\/em>, this paper explores the critical potentiality of young adult fiction in counter posing the hopelessness of dystopian worlds with the hopefulness of adolescent agency in mitigating ecological crises. In this regard, the paper highlights how the dystopian worlds of Ship Breaker and The Water Wars <\/em>are engendered by ecopolitics, environmental racism, and militarism. Furthermore, this paper argues that Bacigalupi and Stracher recognize that anthropocentric conceptions of nature determine its future and thereby use the pragmatic theoretical framework of enlightened anthropocentrism to emphasize environmental concerns within human constructs of value and conservation. This discussion of enlightened anthropocentrism, then leads to an exposition of human agency given that the adolescent protagonists (Nailer and Vera) must learn to escape, evade, and encounter the everyday violence of climate change. Exploring the differential degrees of agency in both novels, the paper ultimately establishes how Ship Breaker and The Water Wars <\/em>emphasize the affirmative aspect of adolescent agency during eco-crises and strategically use the dystopian genre to \u201cwake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it\u201d (Dan Bloom, cited in Vemuri).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Coding Climate Change: Digital Aesthetics and the Legacy of the Lucas Gusher<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Lisa FitzGerald<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>In amongst the bleak predictions of global ecosystems collapse, climate change has infiltrated the mind-set of contemporary digital culture. This paper examines how the digital aesthetics surrounding climate change can be influenced by the material legacies of environmental exploitation. Digital tools have transformed the way we produce art and the emergence of a digital aesthetic has changed the way we visualize our environment. An example of this is John Garrard\u2019s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 <\/em>depicting the site where the renowned \u2018Lucas Gusher\u2019 erupted in Spindletop, Texas in 1901. Western Flag <\/em>was broadcast across three media: streamed online, interrupting regular programming on Channel 4 and on an outdoor LED screen at Somerset House, London. In Garrard\u2019s artwork, the location of the world\u2019s first oil field is recreated as a digital real-time simulation with a flagpole expelling black smoke in place of a flag. Commissioned by Channel 4 to mark Earth Day, Western Flag <\/em>depicts an event that initiated the drive for black gold and the global transformation of the earth\u2019s ecosystems. This paper uses that artwork to examine how climate change has destabilized traditional representations of the environment and how that feeds into the work being created in Digital and New Media Art.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Environmental Degradation and Re-greening: Ecomusicology study of the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Olusegon Titus<\/p>\n

The discovery and production of large oil deposit in Oloibiri community in the late 1950s in the present Niger Delta region of Nigeria have brought unimaginable environmental crisis to the region. It signals the beginning of environmental degradation, the impoverishment of the tress and vegetables and indeed the human beings who inhabit the Region. Several musicians have sung about the environmental degradation and the need for re-greening of Niger Delta land. Their music continue to give authority and relevance to the struggle of regaining environmental sustainability Such activist musicians include Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Timaya, and Lover Boy among others. Their music seeks to draw attention to the fate of both humans and non-humans in the face of oil exploration and its negative consequences on the greening of the Niger Delta. Also, it engages the nostalgia of the greening, and environmental friendliness the region had experienced before the oil explorations and extractions. This paper engages with Rob Nixon\u2019s concept of slow violence and environmentalism of the poor and unpinned the discourse on ecomusicological theory, cultural history, and ethnography, textual and musical analysis. The paper suggests that music is powerful enough to mirror the deteriorating environment of the Niger Delta people. It also explains the devastating effects of the oil extraction on the green environment. The paper also elucidates the advocacy that music play in environmental cleanup, restoration and restitution of sustainable environment in Niger Delta region.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Fly Fishing in the Digital Age: From Eastern Rises to #KeepEmWet<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Cory Willard<\/p>\n

The cultural and positive impact of fly fishing films and other representations has largely been overlooked by critics who seem principally suspicious of the films as being glorified ads for tourism or expressions of visual manipulation bordering on ecopornography\u2014a tradition carried on from the notorious history of using certain types of natural imagery to illicit strong senses of visual desire in the print publications of organizations like Orion, the Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club.\u00a0In The Ecocinema Experience<\/em>, for example, Scott Macdonald argues that \u201c[i]n conventional, commercial film and television, whatever beautiful imagery we do see is onscreen briefly, and as background to the \u2018more important\u2019 melodramatic activities in the foreground. Viewers are implicitly trained to see the beauties of landscape and place as ephemeral and comparatively insignificant, not something deserving of sustained attention or commitment\u201d (21). Despite critical suspicions toward the visuals of fly fishing film as being linked to consumerism and exploitation, the fact remains that the act of fly fishing, the work of fly fishing communities, and particularly fly fishing films\u2014with their various engagements with land, waterways, and artistry\u2014act as a catalyst for change that is expressed as an embodied place connectedness that promotes ecological awareness, activism, and a bond with the sacred through fly fishing.<\/p>\n

Primarily through a study of the 2010 film Eastern Rises <\/em>and the social media hashtag #KeemEmWet, this presentation shall explore the ways that digital and social media have altered the way fly fishers experience the sport and how, particularly through visual media, the practice of fly fishing grapples with important ecological questions and encourages ethical practices.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Going Rogue: A Material Feminist Reading of AltUsNatParkService as Environmental Rhetoric and Ecomedia’s New Resistance Movement<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Amy Propen<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst they came for the scientists\u2026 And the National Parks Services said, \u2018lol, no\u2019 and went rogue and we were all like, \u2018I was not expecting the park rangers to lead the resistance, none of the dystopian novels I read prepared me for this but cool.\u2019\u201d This powerfully clever rationale initially positioned human actors\u2014park rangers, as responsible for the emergence of this digital performance of environmental resistance; however, a material feminist reading, while not precluding the role of the human in such environmental accounts, understands a more nuanced rhetorical configuration. While Karen Barad\u2019s (2008) agential realism is not explicitly aligned with human intentionality, she acknowledges that \u201cparticular possibilities for intra-acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail an ethical obligation to intra-act responsibly in the world\u2019s becoming\u201d (178). Likewise, in Jane Bennett\u2019s (2010) agential assemblage, humans are hardly the only players on the field; nonetheless, she writes that we may consider \u201cthe kind of striving that may be exercised by a human within the assemblage\u201d (38). This presentation toggles between these two notions, ultimately conceptualizing AltUSNatParkService as an emergent, rhetorical configuration of ecomedia, catalyzed by the intra-actions of witting and unwitting actors and institutions that together reckon with and constitute a new environmental resistance. From park rangers, to a now-vulnerable EPA, to rogue national parks, to the Rusty-patched bumblebee, I pair a material feminist approach (Alaimo; Barad; Bennett) with rhetoric scholar Barbara Biesecker\u2019s (1992) understanding of Foucault\u2019s theory of resistance, to argue that AltUSNatParkService and its concomitant bodies, sites, and institutions intra-act in ways that help configure an emergent posthuman environmental rhetoric that performs ethical responsibility in an age of Anthropocene technoscience.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Give It Time: Reframing Place Through Slow TV<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Amanda Hagood<\/p>\n

Slow TV, originally pioneered by Norway\u2019s NRK public television network in 2009 with its Bergensbanen\u2014minutt for minutt <\/em>broadcast, is now (so to speak) creeping into the programming of networks across the globe. The growing genre features continuous, minimally edited footage of commonplace events, such as the eight hour train journey depicted in Bergensbanen <\/em>or birds visiting a feeder (Piip-\u00ad\u2010 show<\/em>, 2014). While U.S. news outlets have greeted slow TV programs as the perfect \u201cantidote\u201d to a frenetic and divisive news cycle, NRK producer Thomas Hellum, envisions slow TV as an entirely new way of telling televisual stories. In a 2014 TED Talk, he attributed slow TV\u2019s appeal to the sense of \u201cevent\u201d it creates: in one sense, a temporal connection between a real time subject and viewer, but in an equally important way, a connection to others who are simultaneously viewing and participating in the documented events. Recalling NRK\u2019s 2011 Hurtigruten\u2014minutt for minutt <\/em>broadcast, which documented a 134-\u00ad\u2010hour coastal voyage, Hellum recalls the crowds of Norwegians who showed up in every port to participate in the program: \u201c\u2026they made the program what it became. They made all the stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slow TV presents an interesting field for ecocritical exploration, which has in recent years experienced its own \u201cslow\u201d turn in asking how diverse media can accurately represent, let alone inspire action around complex, long term environmental issues and processes. Hellum\u2019s implicit assertion\u2014that slow TV engenders both a prolonged and sharpened attention to the world it portrays and a powerfully shared sense of place\u2014invites the question of whether slow TV, like slow cinema, might provide a recalibrating lens to magnify and illuminate viewers\u2019 relationship to place. This presentation explores the premise that slow TV is also \u201cgreen\u201d TV by analyzing the structure and content of several slow TV programs, reviewing viewer response, and, equally importantly, examining production practices for slow TV titles.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Hollywood’s Lifeboat Ethics<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Graig Uhlin<\/p>\n

This paper examines the cultural figure of the lifeboat, which emerges in the wake of environmental or economic crisis as a mode of transition to a new societal equilibrium. The lifeboat dramatizes, I argue, the actual or manufactured imposition of scarcity following the catastrophe of shipwreck, modeling life under limited resources. It characteristically functions as a seemingly neutral recalibration of society\u2019s allocation of resources, serving as a mechanism for dividing the essential from the expendable. The lifeboat therefore raises political and ethical questions about how this division is determined, though it masks these considerations behind a purely rational decision-making process, a techno- scientific management of an ecosystem.<\/p>\n

My presentation considers cinematic lifeboat narratives \u2013 primarily Hollywood films about environmental disaster such as 2012 <\/em>(Roland Emmerich, 2009) and Snowpiercer <\/em>(Bong Joon-ho, 2013) \u2013 to examine to what extent environmental crisis exacerbates class difference rather than erasing it. It is commonly said that climate change affects humanity as a whole \u2013 as Dipesh Chakrabarty claims, there are no lifeboats in the Anthropocene. Yet, even as these films make populist appeals to our common humanity, they deploy the lifeboat as a means of insulating the wealthy from climate change\u2019s most extreme consequences, leaving poorer populations vulnerable. I situate the class politics of Hollywood lifeboat narratives in relation to Garrett Hardin\u2019s controversial 1974 essay \u201cLifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,\u201d which imagined that foreign aid and lax immigration policies would \u201cswamp the boats\u201d of advanced economies, and that austerity measures would bring population back within Earth\u2019s carrying capacity. The neoliberal response to crisis often adopts Hardin\u2019s harsh prescriptions, and environmental disaster films, I argue, are symptomatic of the class inequities of this response.<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence<\/em>, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).<\/p>\n

Garrett Hardin, \u201cLifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,\u201d Psychology Today <\/em>8:4 (September 1974): 38-43, 123-26.<\/p>\n

Sabine H\u00f6hler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990 <\/em>(New York: Routledge, 2014).<\/p>\n

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate <\/em>(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Dynasty<\/em> and #NoDAPL: The Messy Environmental Politics of 2010s Oil Soaps<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Michaela Rife<\/p>\n

On September 30, 2016, the entertainment news website Deadline <\/em>reported that the team behind teen soap Gossip Girl <\/em>was developing a reboot of the 1980s hit Dynasty, <\/em>another primetime soap that traced the melodramas of scheming oil-rich families in Denver. In the same month private security forces hired by the energy firms behind the Dakota Access oil pipeline began a violent campaign against Water Protectors at the Standing Rock. A year later, months after the 45th president approved the pipeline, Dynasty <\/em>premiered on the CW but differentiated itself from its predecessor by moving to Atlanta and including African American and Latinx main characters. Yet oil remains the foundation of Carrington and Colby wealth, even as the first season\u2019s plotlines are sprinkled with fracking disasters and environmental protests. This paper interrogates the incompatible portrayals of twentieth century oil wealth narratives with twenty-first century environmental politics by asking what oil wealth means in mainstream television today. Furthermore, what are the representational stakes of seeing contemporary extractive landscapes through the lens of 1980s pop culture nostalgia? Of course, Dynasty <\/em>is only the latest oil soap reboot. Dallas <\/em>premiered in the summer of 2012, only months after President Obama rejected permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, after years of activist pressure, and ABC launched the original short lived drama Blood & Oil <\/em>in September of 2015. All of these programs benefit from the cultural short hand of the oil tycoon which, as oil studies scholars have shown, connotes both a fabulous and morally compromised kind of wealth. But 2010s primetime soaps engage with, or seem sympathetic to, movements like #NoDAPL. This paper asks what it means for pop culture oil television to rely on narratives of warring oil families while gesturing to indigenous and environmental movements.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>White Flight from Planet Earth: Inverted Quarantine in Interstellar<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Michelle Yates<\/p>\n

This paper is part of a larger project that examines the kinds of ideologies and ways of seeing the world that are embedded in the way climate fiction, namely popular Hollywood climate fiction film, produces and reflects American culture. In this paper, I examine the way that a more recent film Interstellar <\/em>(2014) (re)produces particular hegemonic notions of race and gender, notions that are intimately linked to the environmental dimensions of the film. In Interstellar<\/em>, a team of explorers, including Cooper played by Matthew McConaughey, leave Earth to seek a new planet for humans to inhabit. Due to Blight affecting the world\u2019s food supply, Earth has become an uninhabitable Dust Bowl where human survivability is quickly coming to an end. In this film, Cooper functions as the heroic male agent \u2013 the explorer figure \u2013 who \u201csaves\u201d humanity by discovering a new world for human habitation, as supposedly happens by the end of the film. What audiences also see by the end of the film is that people, namely white people, have returned to civilization on board the spaceship Cooper (orbiting Saturn) as they wait for their new planet to be turned into a pristine, Garden of Eden.1 In this respect, Interstellar <\/em>very much promotes a message regarding white fight from planet Earth (that\u2019s not so unlike the message promoted by the 2008 animated film WALL-E<\/em>). Furthermore, as the blog site Hail to You points out, the use of the term \u201cblight\u201d in Interstellar <\/em>to describe the cause of environmental devastation on Earth very much has racialized overtones, mirroring a discourse of urban decay used to justify both white flight from the city in the post-World War II era as well as gentrification and the displacing of lower-income residents and residents of color from certain city neighborhoods in the present moment. In this respect, Interstellar <\/em>represents a troubling contemporary phenomenon that Andrew Szasz dubs \u2018inverted quarantine.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Miyazaki, Seriously: What Would It Mean to Put Anime into the Teaching Canon of Ecomedia?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Anthony Lioi<\/p>\n

The work of Japanese auteur Miyazaki Hayao represents the rubicon he likes to tell stories about himself. It is the river you cross to get to the witch\u2019s house or the path to the edge of the forest: animation that counts as \u201ccinema,\u201d part of a cosmopolitan vocabulary, respectable because the French award awards to it. And yet, in Anglophone ecocriticism and environmental humanities, still entirely marginal. I have argued elsewhere that ecocriticism must overcome its bias toward literature and other media that descend from the spiritual uplift tradition of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. But if we succeeded in doing so, what would happen? Here I use Miyazaki as the basis of a thought experiment in which animation becomes part of the Ecomedia teaching canon, something one would expect to study when approaching the field.<\/p>\n

If Miyazaki\u2019s work were part of our teaching core, there would be methodological, pedagogical, and ultimately political consequences. First, our ideological bias toward Romantic and (post-)Protestant cultural frames would be displaced without being erased. Students would be obliged to contend with concepts of nature derived from Buddhist and animist traditions forcibly inflected by \u201cWestern\u201d landscapes and philosophies. In matters of representation and form, we would have to grapple with anime\u2019s adaptation of Disney\u2019s American idiom in the post-war Japanese context. By the same token, we would be forced to examine animation as a medium for political critique of industrialism, nuclear proliferation, secularization, and imperialism.<\/p>\n

In sum, the inclusion of Miyazaki in the teaching canon of Ecomedia Studies would promote a critical approach to planetary environmental justice while reinforcing basic skills of intertextual interpretation, formal analysis, and cultural literacy, making his work appropriate for general education classes as well as graduate seminars. That, as they say, is the hard sell.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Eco-sexual Imaginations of the Earth<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Miriam Tola<\/p>\n

This presentation draws on feminist and queer studies to examine the eco-sexual figuration of Lover Earth as counterpoint to Mother Earth. Evoked by grassroots activists as well as public figures such as Pope Francis and Angela Merkel, Mother Earth is an ubiquitous presence in contemporary environmentalism. Feminist scholars, however, have noted that this trope perpetuates the habit to feminize nature and confine women to the realms of reproduction and care. Moving away from Mother Earth, eco-sexual artists and activists propose to shift focus on the earth as a queer lover.<\/p>\n

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens coined the term \u201csexecology\u201d to describe performances, films, and manifestoes in which they celebrate the pleasures of pollen-amorous practices ranging from tree- hugging to \u201cgrassilingus\u201d. Imagining the earth as a queer lover, they argue, forces a reconsideration of questions of care and reciprocity. If Mother Earth implies that someone is taking care of humans, Lover Earth is someone humans desire to care for. This presentation engages limits and possibilities of sexecology. Analyzing films and other materials, it contends that while the image of the earth as queer lover complicates Mother Earth in important ways, it still relies on the notion of partnership between humans and the planet. Not unlike Mother Earth, sexecology obfuscates the turbulent complexity of geological, biological and chemical processes that human action affects and amplifies but is not capable of controlling. The talk concludes by exploring a different notion of care, one that takes radical alterity, rather than reciprocity, as point of departure.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Multi-species in an Emergency: Reshaping rural communities after the Argentinean 2001 Crisis in Albertina Carri’s film La Rabia<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Valeria Meiller<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat might provide the basis for a life in common?\u201d asks Cynthia Willet as the opening question for her reflections on how to set the basis for ethical multi- species communities (Interspecies Ethics, 2). Bridging the philosophical modern cleavage between nature and culture, and its derived binary of human and non- human life, has long been the concern of environmental thinking. This paper analyses the biosocial landscape of the film La Rabia <\/em>(Albertina Carri, 2008) focusing on the representation of human and non-human relationships, and the way these relationships propose autre codes <\/em>(Willet) for shaping alterity, solidarity, and ecological interactions.<\/p>\n

I argue that the crisis of the neoliberal model that Argentina underwent as a consequence of its 2001 economic meltdown reinscribes the relationships of animals and humans. And, that the rural environment portrayed in La Rabia <\/em>offers a gate for re-imagining those relationships through the use of visual and sound clues. The Argentinean economic crisis caused unemployment, riots, the fall of the government, a default of the foreign debt, and the end of the peso\u2019s fixed exchanged rate to the US dollar. I contend that critics and annalists wrote exhaustively about these events but nobody dived into the environmental consequences of the crisis.<\/p>\n

As a country with a farm base economy, an accurate interpretation of its economic meltdown should take animals into account. By adopting the perspective of Animal History, which Susan Nance defines as a subfield of history that \u201cdirects us to document the lives of historical animals as an intrinsically valuable history\u201d (3), I expect to look at La Rabia <\/em>as a cultural artifact that traces down interspecies solidarity as one of the main copping mechanism when confronting the falling of the neoliberal model.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Naturalizing White Supremacy in Low-Budget Shark Attack Movies<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Carter Soles<\/p>\n

Great white sharks are one of the most popular horror film monsters, yet shark attacks on humans in real life are extraordinarily rare. Much of this inaccurate, damaging image of human- eating great whites is traceable to Jaws <\/em>(1975), which David Ingram argues may be seen as a cinematic backlash against rising 1970s environmental concerns (Green Screen <\/em>89). Jaws <\/em>and other shark attack films negatively impact public opinion about great white sharks, popularizing portrayals of shark behaviors that \u201cnecessitate the conquest and killing\u201d of sharks, both on film and in reality (90).<\/p>\n

The Shallows <\/em>(2016) and 47 Meters Down <\/em>(2017) feature blonde women protagonists fighting for their lives against great white sharks. In Richard Dyer\u2019s terms, these human heroines are \u201cordinary\u201d white while the great white sharks they fight are \u201cextreme\u201d white. \u201cExtreme whiteness coexists with ordinary whiteness\u201d and is what \u201cnon-extreme, unspectacular, plain whiteness\u201d aspires to \u2013 yet also fears (White <\/em>222). Ordinary whites hold extreme whiteness \u2013 the white race\u2019s horrible capacity for cruelty and death \u2013 \u201cat a distance,\u201d refusing to see their complicity with it.<\/p>\n

Thus these two shark attack films fulfill an American imperialist function, normalizing American white women ecotourists at the expense of villainized great white sharks whose habitat the former invade. In both films, set in coastal Mexico, a robust site for real-world shark-watching ecotourism, local people of color provide a backdrop, serve as laborers, and even act as a vague xenophobic menace toward the American protagonists. Through their monstrous portrayals of killer sharks and predatory Mexicans, these thrillers function as heavily coded neo-colonialist thrillers for the globalized era. They substitute a white female heroine for the traditional male hero yet maintain the Eurocentric pecking order, asserting the white woman\u2019s superiority over nature as well as her non-white and too-white \u201csubordinates\u201d (Ingram 36).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>New Critical Realities: Indigenous Filmmaking in the Time of Climate Change<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Lisa Bloom<\/p>\n

This paper draws on writing done for my current book project\u00a0Polar Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: Artists and Filmmakers Respond to the Climate Crisis.<\/em> The book addresses polar art not just as an illustration of planetary demise and a call for action. But as a challenge to our imagination. Much of this work brings into being new forms of seeing, feeling, and sociality, that are connected to living through this kind of slow- moving disaster inflicted by environmental and climate breakdown. How very different these emotions of precariousness are from the old flag-planting heroism of explorations to \u201cthe ends of the earth\u201d of an earlier epoch.<\/p>\n

This paper focuses on indigenous artists to shift our view of the polar regions from the heroic to the climatic, from the white, male explorer\u2019s perspective of remote wildernesses to the Inuit\/Indigenous perspective that frames the land and the people of the land as a mix of human and non-human forces. It focuses on the experimental film, \u201cQapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change,\u201d (2010) by Nunavut-based director Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, the first documentary in the Igloolik-based language that explores the grave political realities a Northern indigenous community faces in the context of accelerated climate change. My analysis calls attention to how this film replaces the sublime aesthetic of the polar heroic age with an alternative aesthetic – one that is a counter aesthetic (anti-heroic), that focuses on the everyday (quotidian), and is indigenous (Inuit). The film suggests that it is easier for Euro-American people to elevate the significance of a symbolic polar than to acknowledge Arctic indigenous peoples and their own knowledge system about global warming which is one removed from a statistical perspective and is much closer to home that is quotidian (literally down to earth).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Onscreen Pleasure and Off-Screen Guilt<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Erin Espelie<\/p>\n

Viewers and artists share a burden of guilt involved in experiencing and documenting landscapes, wildlife, and the degrading environmental status of the planet today, in the Anthropocene. Representations, whether photo-realistic or implied, demand a different level of awareness to what lies beyond the screen\u2014not only what exists beyond the frame, but also what efforts, debates, and effects went into the creation of the images. Moreover, the history of place imbues plein air <\/em>settings with fraught purpose and new moral complexities of mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em>. Certainly, some artists cope with these dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion by relying on computer-generated scenes or by working within forgiving genres such as speculative or science fiction. Yet the intangible profundities related to the shooting, recording, storing, editing, refinement, and projection of moving-image pieces cannot be denied or fully subverted, thus certain artists have altered their workflows and moving-image practices. The result is a paradigm shift that often demands alternative forms of living, filming, and viewing–linked to the ethics of making. Notably, artists avoid human subjects, and foreground landscapes, as was pioneered by Godfrey Reggio in the Qatsi <\/em>trilogy, or by focusing on alternative subjects, as in the case of Jean Painlev\u00e9. In this presentation, I will draw from my own moving-image works, which combine analog film with high-definition digital, and I will highlight my feature-length experimental documentary, The Lanthanide Series <\/em>(premiere: CPH:DOX; grand prize Seoul International New Media Festival), shot entirely in reflection of a defunct digital tablet, that eschews the human subject in favor of the geological and otherwise anthropological. I aim to address the ethics of shooting new material, notably with wildlife as subjects, in the context of today’s environmental catastrophes. (The talk would include clips from my own work and from other artists, such as Emily Drummer (Univ of Iowa), Deborah Stratman (Univ of Illinois Chicaco), and Stephanie Barber (MICA).)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Open Educational Resources and Ecomedia Pedagogy: Surveying the Landscape<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Dan Platt<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, the movement for Open educational resources (OER) has sought to lower students\u2019 textbook costs, create adaptable digital teaching tools, and facilitate collaborations between students and instructors. The development of open textbooks and other open educational resources has been concentrated in areas with high course enrollment and high textbook costs, such as Math and Science. However, there is a growing demand for open resources to serve \u201cniche\u201d courses, such as those in the Humanities, which are taught less frequently (and often without a textbook).<\/p>\n

As someone who teaches at a small rural liberal arts college with a high population of under- resourced students, the argument for OER resonates deeply with me. I also believe that creating open resources for the \u201cniche\u201d courses I teach\u2014in Eco-Cinema and the Environmental Humanities\u2014will help to underscore the idea that such courses aren\u2019t luxuries for the privileged few, but should be accessible to all. Over the years, I\u2019ve benefited from excellent digital resources, such as the Ecomedia Studies wiki. However, I believe that there is still an unmet need for open resources aimed at undergraduates in Ecomedia Studies.<\/p>\n

In this presentation, I will offer a brief overview of the growth of OER and the challenges that face OER advocates. I will survey the digital resources that are available for instructors in Ecomedia Studies and in the Environmental Humanities more broadly. In the final portion of the presentation, I will examine opportunities for the collaborative creation of an open textbook that could serve a range of undergraduate courses in Ecomedia Studies. Some questions I hope to address are: What shape would an OER Ecomedia Studies textbook take? How might scholars at different institutions collaborate on such a project? What role can undergraduate students play in the construction of these resources?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Black Bodies, White Earth: Mapping a Modern Aeta Consciousness <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Toward an Ecocinema of the Philippines<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rogelio Garcia<\/p>\n

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 displaced some 10,000 Aetas, an indigenous group of Asiatic pygmies that inhabits the vicinity of the volcano in Zambales, Philippines. When the Aetas returned to their ancestral domains, the lowlanders have crept into their land and transformed portions of it to ranches, resorts, and private properties. The displacement of the Aetas resulted to complex psychological, socio-cultural, economic, agrarian and political tensions that the Aetas face to this day. These tensions are captured by Manoro <\/em>(2006), an independent film set thirteen years after the eruption which tells the story of Jonalyn Ablong, a young Aeta woman who teaches her elders to read and write so they can cast their vote at the Philippine national election for the first time. Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza photographs the film in a documentary style that follows the character\u2019s reterritorialization in a terrain covered with lahar (white volcanic ash). Manoro<\/em> as an avant-garde ecocinema employs minimal directions for acting and dialogue, maximum use of outdoor location and natural light, and casts real non-actor Aetas. Following Jonalyn\u2019s journey through a lahar-covered terrain and the independent film\u2019s journey as ecocinema, the objective of this paper is two-fold. First, it articulates the tensions of the modern Aeta consciousness as embodied by its main character Jonalyn by mapping the post-eruption landscape of Mount Pinatubo as the site of trauma where the black bodies of the Aetas contrast with the earth made white by the explosion of the volcano. Black bodies against white earth is a visual metaphor of the ethnic hierarchy between the Aetas who are highly conscious of their dark complexion, kinky hair, and short stature and the lowlanders that they call \u201cwhite people\u201d, the negotiations between Aeta traditions with modernity, and the loss of sovereignty over their ancestral domain. Second, this paper highlights the significance of Manoro<\/em> as a representative work of ecocinema, a categorization that urgently demands critical attention in the Philippines. As Manoro <\/em>presents a microcosm of the larger environmental and cultural struggles faced by Philippine indigenous communities in the twenty-first century, it grapples against the challenges that an independent avant-garde ecocinema faces in terms of distribution, accessibility, and audience reception.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Living\/Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew Holtmeier<\/p>\n

This presentation discusses the eco-aesthetic strategies of Patricio Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s The Pearl Button <\/em>(2015) in relation to the displacement of indigenous populations. In The Pearl Button, <\/em>Guzm\u00e1n explores the role water played in shaping how the Selk\u2019nam inhabited the Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia through \u2018cosmovisions\u2019 (Joni Adamson), sequences that extend beyond human perception, even as they link the habitation of indigenous peoples to subsequent colonial and political projects. I argue that Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s \u201ccosmovisual aesthetic\u201d critiques bioregional perspectives, suggesting unique ways in which ecomedia might contribute to larger environmental discourses.<\/p>\n

Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s cosmovisual aesthetic ranges from extreme close-ups to reveal minute details in objects to aerial shots that articulate the shapes of coasts and even to telescopic shots depicting planets and nebulae. He works with archival photography and the superimposition of images\/sounds in order to create a pluriverse of peoples and environments, which moves beyond human audiovisual and temporal perception. \u201cIlluminating \u2018things\u2019 in the natural world that cannot be seen by the human eye, including multi-scale relationships between species functioning in systems\u201d (Adamson 2014: 181), the film shows \u201cthings\u201d vital to Indigenous worldviews. In doing so, it connects how water influenced the ways in which the Selk\u2019nam inhabited Chile, but also the colonial project of Spain in Chile and water\u2019s relationship to the later dictatorship and political murders under Augusto Pinochet.<\/p>\n

By illuminating Indigenous presence, The Pearl Button <\/em>complicates the notion of bioregionalism, which does not critically examine the displacement of indigenous people. Popularizing the term, bioregionalism, Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann extoll the virtues of \u2018living-in-place,\u2019 but a return-to-nature narrative emerges, which ignores Indigenous displacement. The Pearl Button <\/em>illustrates how one might \u2018live-in-place,\u2019 but also how the environment relates to displacement, genocide, and political disappearances, acknowledging the diverse and deadly relationships between the human and non-human.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Decolonizing Drones: Aerial Media in the #NoDAPL Struggle<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Emily Roehl<\/p>\n

In North Dakota, from the summer of 2016 through the winter of 2017, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies set up camps in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In May of 2017, leaked documents revealed that the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, hired private security firm TigerSwan to monitor the actions of water protectors at Standing Rock. Aerial images distributed on social media contributed to TigerSwan\u2019s surveillance of the encampments as well as to the performance of resistance to settler colonial energy development. In recent years, social media platforms like Facebook have been used as digital stages for the performance of resistance, as media makers broadcast actions to remote viewers who watch them unfold through the proscenium frame of a Facebook Live video. This presentation will consider the use of drones in the #NoDAPL movement. Myron Dewey of Digital Smoke Signals used drone video in at least two ways: as evidence of police violence and to document performances of resistance on the ground. While TigerSwan used aerial media as an intelligence tool, Dewey harnessed surveillance technologies to produce counter-optics to the militarization of energy infrastructure struggles, making media that reflected state violence back on the energy companies and mercenaries who enabled that violence. In this presentation, I will compare the tactics and optics produced by TigerSwan and Dewey.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Decolonially Queer: Indigenous Ecocriticism, Queer Ecologies, and Multispecies Relationships in Recent Latin American Film and Art<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Vera Coleman<\/p>\n

Indigenous communities of Latin America and around the world have for thousands of years developed sophisticated understandings of sexual diversity and gender performativity within and beyond the scope of the human. Ritual shape-shifting practices that traverse species lines and reveal fluid, amorphous sexualities, problematize the Western categorizing regimes that bolster what Walter Mignolo calls the \u201ccolonial matrix of power.\u201d Multispecies relationships and artistic forms that blur the boundaries between sexualities and orders of life can help us dismantle patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric discourses around what constitutes the \u201cnatural.\u201d Engaging with recent examples of Latin American ecomedia through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on indigenous ecocriticism, queer ecologies, and material ecocriticism, I argue that more-than-human queer performativities help us imagine unexpected landscapes of multispecies flourishing and decolonial environmental justice beyond the inequities of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Critiques of the problematic linkages among classification, colonization, patriarchy, and extinction pervade various sculptural installations by Colombian artist Mar\u00eda Fernanda Cardoso, whose works uncover indigenous Muisca ritual symbolism and knowledge about sexuality and ecology while materializing overlapping histories of social and environmental exploitation in the northern Andes. In pieces such as Corona para una princesa chibcha <\/em>and Ranas bailando<\/em>, Cardoso enacts a sophisticated cultural critique of New World naturalist-explorers\u2019 obsession with collecting and preserving \u201cspecimens\u201d while queering the heteronormative semiotics of the natural history museums whose displays those specimens filled. In a similar fashion, in the films El ni\u00f1o pez <\/em>and XXY <\/em>directed by Argentine filmmaker Luc\u00eda Puenzo, indigenous and queer protagonists denaturalize gender categories and heteronormative constructions of kinship while resisting legacies of colonization and resource extraction in the Southern Cone. In addition to uncovering indigenous Guaran\u00ed language and ecological knowledge, Puenzo\u2019s films feature trans-species beings (like the titular \u201cfish child\u201d) that dismantle the tenuous boundaries between culture and nature, male and female, human and nonhuman.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Eco-Testimonies and Eco-Memories in Olosho<\/em>: Placing Indigenous Ecomedia within the De-\/Coloniality of Nature<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Felix Mantz<\/p>\n

\u201cMany have spoken for us, now we speak for ourselves\u201d are the opening words of the indigenous Maasai film Olosho<\/em>, which was screened during the 11th Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival 2017 at SOAS University of London. This phrase implies the unequal relations of power underlying problems of Eurocentric narration and the locus of enunciation against which the Maasai have struggled since 1891 and before. Olosho <\/em>uses Maasai testimony of the ongoing struggles over their ancestral lands against foreign investors and the Tanzanian state by incorporating six representatives from Maasai tribes in Loliondo (Tanzania), who report on new rounds of dispossession and neo-colonialism.<\/p>\n

In this paper, I study the decolonial aesthetics of the Maasai narratives in Olosho <\/em>as explicit examples of eco-testimonies and eco-memories that challenge Eurocentric images of the helpless and inferior indigenous African incapable of agency within the web of global coloniality. In doing so, I draw on decolonial theory and the de-\/coloniality of nature, which follows Escobar\u2019s (2008) discussion on the establishment of colonial hierarchies and sub-hierarchies among (Hu)man and Nature, the subordination of different Natures to the white\/Eurocentric\/rational mind and the attempted destruction of indigenous knowledge systems.<\/p>\n

More specifically, I analyze Olosho <\/em>as part of the \u201cdecolonial aesthetic turn,\u201d defined by Maldonado-Torres (2016) as the move away from modern\/colonial forms of knowing towards decolonial ways of embodiment, performance, sensing and questioning. From here, I also explore the role of ecomedia within trans-indigenous resistance against the Anthropocene\u2019s multi- dimensional ecological crises, where ecomedia emerges as weapon for the de-\/coloniality of nature against intersecting deep structures such as Eurocentrism, coloniality, anthropocentrism, patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism. The decolonial aesthetics of eco-testimonies and eco- memories from Loliondo\u2019s Maasai are a powerful mosaic within the global project for environmental, racial and gender justice which follows de la Cadena\u2019s (2010) call for a pluriversal politics that demands the provincialization of knowledge, the unlearning of a single ontology and the recognition of multiple socionatural world.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Inal Mama<\/span><\/em>: Subjugated Indigenous Knowledges and the Sacredness of the Coca Leaf<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Abigail Perez Aguilera<\/p>\n

Inal Mama<\/em>, is the sacred coca leaf for indigenous Andean peoples, including the Quechua, Guarani and Afro-Quechua peoples. The indigenous ecomedia project, Inal Mama <\/em>(2008) is an Andean documentary feature production by Eduardo L\u00f3pez Zavala that follows the lives of different indigenous groups across Bolivia and Paraguay. The ancestral sacredness of Inal Mama <\/em>is contraposed with the use of the coca leaf for producing cocaine by non-indigenous peoples. As expressed in the documentary, indigenous peoples\u2019 connection to Inal Mama <\/em>is one based on continuation of life, energy, health, spirituality and the continuation of life. On the opposite side, according to one Guarani leader, Western civilization has made a mockery of the coca leaf by using it for recreational purposes disregarding its sacredness, its relation to indigenous peoples, and its connection to the continuation (and resistance) of Andean culture. Inal Mama <\/em>addresses how the use of cocaine and the war on drugs in Bolivia goes hand in hand with the subjugation of indigenous peoples in the Andes for the use of the coca leaf. I argue that this indigenous ecomedia piece presents us with two perspectives regarding the coca leaf, one that shows Inal Mama <\/em>as a non-human agent who is abused, commodified, prohibited and criminalized, and another depicting it as a mother, a nurturer of life which constitutes symbiosis between non- human and human life.<\/p>\n

I analyze Inal Mama <\/em>through an indigenous decolonial, anti-capitalist\/imperialist approach. By relying on the works of Lugones (2006); Fausto Reinaga (1978; 1979; 1974), Marisol de la Cadena (2008;2010) and indigenous Andean feminist approaches such as those of Rivera Cusicanqui (2010; 1986) and Julieta Paredes (2011), I provide a decolonial analysis of Inal Mama<\/em>, an indigenous ecomedia piece, using Global South theories of nature, gender, imperialism and Global South-North relations. As presented in Inal Mama<\/em>, the use of the coca leaf is an essential part of indigenous identity and revitalization of indigenous knowledge systems. Hence, the coca leaf becomes a non-human person within indigenous Andean cosmopolitics as shown in Inal Mama. <\/em>With this analysis, I consider decolonization as a socio- political ongoing project in the Andes against slow violence and a monumental modernity.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>Praise Your Capacity: Oceania, the Anthropocene, and Craig Santos Perez’s Videopoems<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rebecca Hogue<\/p>\n

Both Indigenous studies and ecocriticism have long centered on land\u2014on its dispossession, destruction, and dynamism. But what about water, or more specifically, the ocean? Water Protectors at Standing Rock powerfully exclaimed \u201cWater is Life,\u201d \u201cMni Wiconi\u201d and gathered millions of followers to advocate for water protection. However, in the Pacific Ocean, and other places in the world with low-lying atolls, in this time of climate change, water does indeed bring life, but it also brings death. Sea level rise, coral bleaching, and salinization changes threaten the oceanic ecosystems that have sustained life on the Pacific Islands for millennia. Now, as a region long beleaguered by Western narratives of tranquility or passivity, Indigenous artists of Oceania are turning to visual media to rectify these erasures and provide witnesses, in the words of Rob Nixon, of \u201csights unseen.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a timely example, Chamarro poet Craig Santos-Perez\u2019s 2017 videopoem \u201cPraise Song for Oceania,\u201d renders the ocean storyteller and wayfinder. Here he utters the names of the ocean from across Oceania\u2019s great expanse: \u201ctasi & kai & tai & moana nui & vasa & \/ tahi & lik & wai tui & daob & wonsolwara.\u201d Representing the ocean from Gu\u00e5h\u00e5n to Hawai\u02bbi to Aotearoa to Samoa to Tonga to Fiji to Belau to Papua New Guinea, Santos-Perez navigates the Pacific through the undulating body that joins each of these lands together. Moreover, in Santos-Perez\u2019s videopoem \u201cHalloween in the Anthropocene\u201d (2016) his speaker, painted in a horrifying mask, traverses the globe while examining the tricks and treats of late capitalism, and demonstrates the ocean\u2019s gifts alongside its harms. These videopoems demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Oceania\u2019s metaphorism and materiality within the anthropocene, and have been shown at a variety of film festivals across the globe. This presentation will advocate for the importance of visuality alongside the narratological and historiographic rewriting of Oceania amidst the impact of climate change.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>The Ecology of Media Objects: Teaching Ecomedia with the Ecomedia\/sphere Heuristic<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Antonio Lopez<\/p>\n

Teaching ecomedia entails going beyond traditional textual analysis, requiring that we apply a more holistic approach that allows for the ecological exploration of media objects. In this paper, I will introduce an integrative method of analysis I devised called the \u201cecomedia\/sphere.\u201d The ecomedia\/sphere heuristic is a figurative map that embeds media objects within a greater ecosystem of \u201cspheres\u201d (bio-, ethno-, semio-, info-, etc.). At the center of the ecomedia\/sphere (visualized in 2-D as a circle divided into four sections), we situate a media object, which can be a media text (such as an advertisement, news article, television commercial, website, film, etc.) or gadget (smart phone, tablet, computer, etc.). Modeled on the concept of a boundary objects, a media object is something that has mutually recognizable form but changes meaning according to context. Subsequently, learners are asked to explore the media object\u2019s use and meaning from four different media\/sphere perspectives: lifeworld, eco-materialist, political economy, and culture. Conceptually and theoretically, these four perspectives correspond with various lenses that inform media studies and environmental studies. For example, we all agree the media object, Blade Runner 2049<\/em>, is film released in 2017. But the film has different meanings and uses to the audience, critics, crew, actors, marketers and studio that produced it. From a lifeworld perspective, the film is examined based on the \u201cecocinema experience\u201d of the audience. The eco- materialist perspective explores the physical properties and impacts of the film on the environment. The political economy assessment approaches the film as a global media product and commodity. The cultural approach examines the film\u2019s discourses, narratives and cultural themes in relationship to ecology. Like cultural studies\u2019 circuit of culture model, all these spheres interact with each other and are iterative. The goal is for learners to take any media object and to contextualize it within an interconnected ecosystem of human and more-than-human dimensions.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>The Future is Wild: Speculative Evolution and the Post-Anthropocene<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Anne Schmalstig<\/p>\n

The BBC\/Discovery Channel documentary series The Future Is Wild <\/em>(2003) and Alan Weisman\u2019s nonfiction The World Without Us <\/em>(2007) both imagine an Earth devoid of humans, where different species dominate. Weisman considers how cities, forests, human-made products, and animals will survive without us. His extensive research and interviews with evolutionary scientists lead him to conclude, for example, that megafauna would flourish and traces of human civilization would be quickly subsumed by unbridled vegetation and silt from rising waters. The Future Is Wild <\/em>similarly draws on the expertise of biologists, geologists, and paleontologists to imagine how current species would adapt, mix, and evolve in new environments created by global warming and cooling that, ignoring the rapid climate changes occurring in the Anthropocene Age, would normally have occurred 5, 100, and 200 million years from now.<\/p>\n

Weisman\u2019s book has received criticism for its casual dismissal of humanity without accounting for how humans will disappear and what environmental and social damage they will do in the process. I will examine both texts\u2019 positionings beyond humanity and Anthropocenic climate change, but I will especially focus on the nonfiction and documentary strategies that both texts employ to make their narrative leaps into a human-less future. The Future Is Wild <\/em>is particularly interesting in that it situates itself in the future with digitally created videos of futuristic hybrid animals like \u201cflish\u201d; these are filmed in a nature-documentary style with follow shots and close- ups on the animals, but are narrated via voiceover in the future tense. Positioning these wild animals both as \u201cplausible\u201d and completely fabricated, The Future Is Wild <\/em>walks a fine line between documentary and fiction while omitting how humans will and are already impacting real species in existence today. Ultimately, this paper will critique the utility of speculative evolution and docufiction in ecocritical discourse.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a>The Urban Ecology of Jim Jarmusch’s <\/span>Paterson<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Caren Irr<\/p>\n

This presentation examines urban spaces in Jim Jarmusch\u2019s 2016 feature,\u00a0Paterson<\/em>. Like its modernist intertext, William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson<\/em>, Jarmusch’s film is set in postindustrial New Jersey; the film\u00a0<\/em>scrutinizes one week in the life of a bus driver (also named Paterson) who writes poems. It depicts Paterson\u2019s routines through on-screen incidents and traces their conversion into poems through voiceovers, scenes of writing, and subtitling. This depiction of creative labor shares the screen with the numerous visual projects of Paterson\u2019s wife. The co-creation process enlivens the couple\u2019s modest house, a structure repeatedly depicted in tightly framed and static frontal shots that resist glamorizing the surroundings. Similar shots framed by bus windows and mirrors extend this practice to the fading commercial landscape of the city. While a few quasi-Romantic shots index the dynamism of the Passaic River waterfalls, the film\u2019s dominant motif conveys a painterly appreciation of a decaying urban landscape. I argue that this vision (also characteristic of Jarmusch\u2019s earlier films, especially\u00a0Stranger than Paradise<\/em>) offers an important alternative to the apocalypticism that plagues environmental narratives and often punishes cities in particular. As eco-critics such as Buell and Heise have demonstrated, apocalyptic visions typically rely heavily on spectacles of extreme destruction, and they tend to trigger an affective horror against which viewers seek to protect themselves. In contrasst, Jarmusch\u2019s more understated approach presents a more affirmative approach to a post-Romantic urban ecology; I call this approach eco-stoicism.<\/p>\n

Rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, Stoicism promotes the virtue of living according to nature. Modulating personal desires and actions within a rationally ordered though highly malleable cosmos is the task of Stoics. The Stoic concept of the polis <\/em>or city describes sites of possible human dwelling in the dynamic cosmos.\u00a0 My discussion makes the case that Jarmusch’s film demonstrates the value of\u00a0a Stoic-influenced concept of urban ecology for contemporary ecological concerns.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>To Instill a Love for Them: Plant Cinematography and Botanical Ethics<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

John Ryan<\/p>\n

Written and narrated by David Attenborough, and released in 2012, the documentary Kingdom of Plants 3D <\/em>was filmed over one year at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. It incorporated advances in time-lapse cinematography and other techniques, such as infrared, to render the lives of plants visible to viewers. The audience metamorphosed into active participants when, for instance, tablets could be employed to accelerate and reverse flowering, as part of the documentary project. A review of the film in The Guardian <\/em>implies the aptness of time-lapse to expressing the particular beingness of plants, commenting that \u201cit\u2019s only when you speed them up that they reveal their true nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding its technical chic, Attenborough\u2019s documentary can be regarded as a relatively recent incarnation of the more-than-100-year-old lineage of \u201cplant cinematography\u201d (Petterson 2011, 90) within the broader context of the \u201cenvironmental documentary\u201d tradition (Duvall 2017; Hughes 2014). Most notably, the British naturalist and filmmaker Frank Percy Smith innovated time-lapse techniques in landmark documentaries such as Birth of a Flower <\/em>(1911) and The Germination and Plants <\/em>(1911), becoming one of the first cinematographers to record the opening of a bud. Moreover, in 1912, the photographer Arthur Clarence Pillsbury produced a time-lapse film to advocate the protection of Yosemite wild flowers threatened with extinction. Pillsbury aimed to \u201cinstill a love for them, a realization of their life struggles so similar to ours, and a wish to do something to stop the ruthless destruction of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Invoking theorizations from the field of critical plant studies (for example, Marder 2014), this paper will examine the extent to which contemporary botanical cinematography promotes ethics through its mediation of vegetal life. An ethical regard for plants\u2014one grounded in scientific principles of vegetal intelligence\u2014provides a countermeasure to the aestheticization of flowers. In developing my analysis, I will refer to prominent examples of botanical documentary filmmaking of the last thirty years, including Our Botanical Biosphere <\/em>(1990), The Private Life of Plants <\/em>(1995), In the Mind of Plants <\/em>(2008) and The Botany of Desire <\/em>(2009).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Wilderness and Cat Protagonists in Turkish, American, British, and Italian Movies of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries<\/span><\/p>\n

Fazila Derya Agis<\/p>\n

This study will analyze the cognitive emotional metaphors underlying the body gestures of cats living in urban places, or gardens, representing wilderness. Thus, each emotional body posture of cats will be depictedin terms of Lakoff and Johnson\u2019s (1980) Cognitive Metaphor Theory. Some examples to cognitive metaphors associated with cats\u2019 emotional states include \u201cANGER IS HEAT,\u201d \u201cFEAR IS COLDNESS,\u201d \u201cFEAR IS HIDING,\u201d \u201cHIGH – WAGGING TAILS ARE LOVE,\u201d \u201cLOW – WAGGING TAILS ARE HATE,\u201d \u201cCLAWS ARE DEFENSE,\u201d \u201cPUPILS STAND FOREMOTIONS,\u201d et cetera. The Turkish documentary movie \u201cKedi<\/em>\u201d (\u201cThe Cat\u201d), the American movie \u201cThe Private Life of a Cat\u201d (1944), the British movie\u201cThe Sick Kitten\u201d (1903) and the Italian movie \u201cIl Gatto<\/em>\u201d (\u201cThe Cat\u201d) (1977) will be compared culturally. Turkish, American, British, and Italian cultural approaches towards cats as emotional creaturesthat can bring luck, or can be either crime victims, or ill will be discussed through cognitive approaches towardsecological cinema. Thus, the focus should be shifted away from humans to cats in ecomedia in terms of environmental ethnography, legal studies, and history. We can read the historical ecomedia of early 1900\u2019s, late 1900\u2019s, and today by comparing the ethnographic approaches of humans towards the emotional states of cats. Historical ecomedia should be used in persuading people that there are laws for animals\u2019 well-being around the globe and animals have cognitive abilities and emotions; laws on animals and ethnographic beliefs about animals in the above-mentioned movies can be used to teach ecomedia\u2019s importance in preventing animal abuse and several crimes against animals that have their private lives and emotions as well. Compassion should be taught through ecological movies, emphasizing the emotions the cats, or other animals may feel in different situations.<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Comencini, Luigi, Augusto Caminito, Fulvio Marcolin, Ugo Tognazzi, Mariangela Melato, and Michel Galabru. 2017. “Il Gatto (1977)”.\u00a0Imdb<\/em>. Accessed September 9 2017. http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0076069\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hammid, Alexander. Amos Vogel Annenberg School of Communications Collection (Harvard Film Archive). (1944).\u00a0The private life of a cat<\/em>. United States.<\/p>\n

“Kedi – Official U.S. Trailer – Oscilloscope Laboratories”. 2017.\u00a0Youtube<\/em>. Accessed September 9 2017. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lKq7UqplcL8<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johson. 1980.\u00a0Metaphors we live by<\/em>. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n

Smith, George Albert.1903.The sick kitten<\/em>. United Kingdom: Charles Urban Trading Co.<\/p>\n

Torun, Ceyda and Wuppermann, Charlie. 2016. Kedi<\/em>. [United States]: Oscilloscope Laboratories.<\/p>\n

Biography:<\/p>\n

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Ankara University; I am writing my dissertation on the letters of Amerigo Vespucci from an ecocritical perspective. I earned my M.S. degree in Social Anthropology from Middle East Technical University, my M.A. in English Linguistics from Hacettepe University, and my B.A. in Italian Language and Literature from Ankara University. I have taught at Girne American University and the University of People. I worked also as a visiting scholar at Brandeis University.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Petro-modernity and Petro-temporality in Werner Herzog’s<\/span> Lessons of Darkness<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Kyle Sittig<\/p>\n

This paper aims to outline what I\u2019m tentatively calling \u201cpetro-cinematic aesthetics\u201d and \u201cpetro-temporalities.\u201d By reframing cinema\u2019s crucial role as marker and purveyor of modern experience in terms of oil, we can reveal the way the rise of technological modernity, as well as vernacular cinema practices, are always drenched in oil. Additionally, the temporalities of peak oil force us to think about the inevitable and rapidly approaching consequences of the ever- accelerating production of modern capitalist life.<\/p>\n

Approaches to ecocinema, ranging from its pedagogical possibilities, to the contradictions inherent in environmental film production, are consistently rooted in dialectical critique. For petro-cinema, the dialectic brings the visual promise of oils infinitude – as it gushes forth from the earth and burns with kinetic fury – into conflict with the reality of oils rapid extinction. These theoretical approaches are consistently working intertextually with film narratives, folding in on each other in competing temporalities and materialities. Gauging the possibilities of these radical petro-cinema aesthetics and temporalities, this paper uses Werner Herzog\u2019s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness <\/em>as a prototype. Lessons of Darkness <\/em>challenges conventions of both traditional narrative and political documentary. Through its extreme defamiliarization of perspective toward the oil fields of Kuwait in the wake of the Gulf War, the film\u2019s ravaged landscape promotes a focus on the more affective aesthetic properties of its environmental spectacle.<\/p>\n

From here, the theoretical applications of this approach can be used to further address petro-narratives of the communities most impoverished by the oil economy. From Blaxploitation to cinemas of the global south, the aesthetics of oil are experienced separately in areas of environmental degradation that never receive oil\u2019s promise, always in dialectical conflict with the areas where oil pays off and becomes invisible in so many ways.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Ecodata \u2014 Ecomedia \u2014 Ecoaesthetics, or: Technologies of the Ecological after the Anthropocene<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Yvonne Volkart, Rasa Smite, and Aline Veillat<\/p>\n

This paper presents the exhibition and research project Ecodata \u2013 Ecomedia \u2013 Ecoaesthetics which investigates new media, technologies and techno-scientific methods (registering, collecting and interpreting data) in the arts in view of understanding their role and significance for the perception and awareness of \u2018the ecological\u2019. The project is composed of three parts: group exhibition, theory (analysis of various ecomedia projects) and practice (aesthetic research relative to the alpine forest Pfynwald).<\/p>\n

Assuming that there is no escape of technology in our technosphere, the believe in technologies as tools for information and help is widespread in both technophile and critical discourses of the Anthropocene. \u201cEmbracing the paradox\u201d and connecting to techno-scientific methods of observing the world, many artists use technologies like sensors and methods like Big Data to get in touch with what has been unknown for a long time. They try to \u2018translate\u2019 (i.e. making visible or hearable) earthbound signals into human perception, in order to deliver information and establish new relations between non-humans and humans. But what exactly do ecomedia and ecodata deliver\/narrate, and to whom do they deliver\/narrate? How do they affect us? What kind of experiences are possible if a forest, the soil, the air turns out to be a contingent and relational techno-organism, dependent of various actors? And what happens, if the audience is not anymore human only, but interspecies-correlated?<\/p>\n

Drawing on theories of media-ecology as well as on results of the own practice based aesthetic research project in the forest Pfynwald and the group exhibitions this paper discusses how ecomedia might enable (or not) participation and transversal thinking in the time after the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Biographies:<\/p>\n

Dr. Yvonne Volkart is lecturer in art and media theory and researcher at the Academy of Art and Design, FHNW Basel. She directs the SNSF-funded research project Ecodata \u2013 Ecomedia \u2013 Ecoaesthetics. The Role and Significance of Technologies and Technoscientific Methods in the Arts for the Perception and Awareness of the Ecological<\/em>. Finished research project: Times of Waste<\/em>. She is co-curator of the group exhibition Eco-Visionaries (with Sabine Himmelsbach and Karin Ohlenschl\u00e4ger). https:\/\/www.fhnw.ch\/de\/personen\/yvonne-volkart<\/p>\n

Prof. Dr. Rasa Smite is an artist, educator, and cultural innovator, founder of RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga, curator of RIXC Art and Science festival, and chief editor of the Acoustic Space journal and book series. Rasa is a researcher at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, Switzerland, a professor in Liepaja University, and visiting lecturer in the MIT Art, Culture and Technology Program. http:\/\/smitesmits.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr Aline Veillat: Since 2016: involved in three art&sciences research projects on ecological issues – Eco-data<\/em> Basel Academy of Art and Design and Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (CH) – Culture and memories of flood<\/em> Mulhouse Research Centre for Economies, Societies, Arts and Techniques (FR) – Thinking from the bottom up, when the soil yields its secrets <\/em>Aix-Marseille Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology (FR). http:\/\/alineveillat.com<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Still the Water<\/span><\/em>: Tension Between Cinematic Animism and Post-Anthropocentrism in Global Eco Art Cinema<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn<\/p>\n

Since 2000, Naomi Kawase has been invited to Cannes eight times\u2014more than any other living Japanese director. Similar to many critical analyses of films by influential women directors, interpretations of Kawase\u2019s work tend to focus on gender, for good reason (Mes and Sharp, 2004; Iles, 2008; Karatsu, 2009; Taylor\u2013Jones, 2013). Not only is sustained analysis of work by women filmmakers vital to contemporary film scholarship, but Kawase\u2019s films are also particularly ripe for feminist readings. Far less studied in Kawase\u2019s films, however, is the role of the natural environment, even though most reviews and analyses have touched upon the power of that world in her work. Variety\u2019s Guy Lodge (2017) has called Kawase \u2018Japan\u2019s premier cinematic naturalist\u2019, and IndieWire\u2019s Nikola Grozdanovic (2014) has argued that her films explore \u2018man\u2019s place in nature\u2019 as well as, if not even better than, the best scenes in Terrence Malick\u2019s films.<\/p>\n

In response, this paper examines the ecological aspects of Kawase\u2019s work. By analysing her post-Fukushima film Still the Water<\/em> (2014), the paper explores the tension between two sides of the post-anthropocentric vision in global eco art cinema. On the one hand, the film adopts cinematic animism as an approach to de-centre humans and as a utopian ideal amid the challenges of the Anthropocene. On the other, the film underscores that unreservedly embracing animism, Japanese enactments of which often include animal slaughter, can be problematic from the perspective of critical animal scholarship.<\/p>\n

Biography:<\/p>\n

Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn received a PhD in Film Studies from Queen Mary,\u00a0 University of London. Soon, he will start his British Academy Visiting Fellowship with a project titled \u2018Southeast Asian Cinema and the Anthropocene\u2019 at The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), the University of Westminster. His thesis \u2018The Cinematic Forest: Toward Post-Anthropocentrism in Global Art Cinema\u2019 investigates the ways in which the forests in selected art cinemas hold a potential to reveal post-anthropocentric perspective to the world. Beyond theoretical undertakings, he also works as a film curator.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Visualizing ecological crisis of (global) cold war militarism and the grassroots protest in the “ecopolitical cinema” of South Korea, Japan and Beyond<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Minhwa Ahn<\/p>\n

In the era of Trump administration, the doomsday clock shows only around two minutes to go. In response to this, the documentary films such as The Bomb<\/em> (2016) and Thirty Second to Midnight<\/em> (2017) were made. They trace the global nuclear war crisis which was led by (new) cold war militarism. With this current events, this paper introduces the visuality of ecological disaster by militarism located in East Asia. First, the dropping of the atomic bombs by the U.S. in Japan is the most explicit example of both genocide and ecological crisis at the beginning of postwar militarism in East Asia. However, Korean hibakusha (A-bomb Victims) had no public recognition for a few decades, being excluded from the national bodies of both Japan and Korea. Thus, beginning with Korean hibakusha (A-bomb Victims) documentaries, I examine films that problematized the way that the Japanese and South Korean government treated hibakusha as excluded bodies from the developing Japanese and Korean urban landscape or symbolized their radiated bodies as contaminated slum. Furthermore, this postwar militarism in East Asia, in which military occupation, mass death and displacement or self-exile occur, can be linked to later catastrophes such as nuclear disaster and environmental contamination. For example, contemporary documentaries such as Jeju Prayer<\/em> (2012), the Ghosts of Jeju<\/em> (2013), and We Shall Overcome<\/em> (2015) demonstrate recent radiological and environmental contamination by the military bases, touching \u2018Jeju 4.3 massacre\u2019 and \u2018Battle of Okinawa.\u2019 By calling these documentary films \u2018ecopolitical cinema\u2019 in the age of the anthropocene, I will trace how discourses of ecocriticism can draw out not only issues of industrial crisis in Asia, but also can critique aspects of (cold) war developmentalism in East Asia. In other words, I seek to the ways discourses of ecocriticism can be connected with cinematic strategies of the films above such as data visualization, pictorial realism (Sean Cubitt) and documentary as intelligent work (Jonathan Kahana). Here, these films respond to the governance of life and death by militarism and environmental changes and foreground grassroots movements and migration.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Black Lodge Anthropocene: Twin Peaks<\/em> Ecomedia<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Andy Hageman<\/p>\n

The recent and long-anticipated third season of the television series Twin Peaks<\/em> remarkably extended as well as reframed the initial two seasons that ran from 1990 to 1991. While the developments of familiar characters and the introduction of new ones have claimed a large share of the critical reaction to the new season, these coexist with significant arcs in the town\u2019s environment and economy as well as the mysterious multi-dimensional Black Lodge that exists, in dialectical relationship with the White Lodge, in a liminal space where the woods around Twin Peaks brush up against \u201canother place\u201d to borrow part of the name of a Black Lodge inhabitant who morphs from human form into a supernatural tree being. Such geographical dialectics create vital narrative dynamics within the series, and they extend uncannily to the relationship that continues to unfold between Twin Peaks<\/em> and the Snoqualmie and North Bend, Washington area where much of the exterior filming was done. This talk will explore the evolution of ecomedia elements within the series in light of the third season and Mark Frost\u2019s recent Twin Peaks companion books, and put this text-focused analysis in conversation with the dynamic between reel and real Twin Peaks as it plays out in a range of locations that include Snoqualmie Falls and the Salish Lodge, the Weyerhauser Mill, the Mar-T Caf\u00e9 (now Twede\u2019s), and The Black Lodge restaurant in Vancouver, B.C. Canada. By considering the media representations of the Anthropocene as well as environmentalism and capitalist development of land, resources, and labor in the series with research into how development has unfolded in this part of Washington state, this talk embraces the mind-altering weirdness inherent to Twin Peaks<\/em> alongside its deeply grounded capacity for social refraction and critique.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>“Neigh Way, Jose”: BoJack Horseman’s <\/em>Rejection of Cute Animality\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

James Cochran<\/p>\n

The Netflix original BoJack Horseman<\/em> appeared in 2014, and since its release, the show has had four seasons and has been renewed for a fifth season. The show follows BoJack, a humanoid horse who was once the star of the late 1980s and early 1990s sitcom \u201cHorsing Around,\u201d a show in which Bojack took care of three orphaned human children. In the three years since its release, the show has started to garner some critical attention. For example, Alissa Chater situates BoJack<\/em> among more conventional sitcoms like Real Housewives<\/em> and The Brady Bunch<\/em>. More recently, Benjamin Marks examines the show\u2019s somewhat progressive representation of asexuality.<\/p>\n

Approaching BoJack<\/em> as an eco-media project, this essay argues that BoJack <\/em>resists the \u201ccute aestheticization\u201d of animals that has been common in twentieth-century animation, especially in Disney cartoons and films. For example, describing Disney\u2019s Animal Kingdom, Garry Cross and John K. Walton argue that Disneyland \u201cmade animals into cute characters, even props of storylines for the rides and attractions. The success of the feature-length cartoon, Lion King<\/em>, set the tone and advertised the Animal Kingdom with its cutesified animals learning to live in harmony\u201d (100). Drawing on Timothy Morton\u2019s dark and queer ecology, a framework that emphasizes the \u201cstrangeness\u201d and \u201cuncanniness\u201d of nonhuman beings, I suggest that BoJack<\/em> challenges the conventional Disney depiction of animals as \u201ccute.\u201d BoJack swears, drinks alcohol, consumes drugs, and engages in non-normative sexual behavior. In addition, many of the characters are seemingly animals but are also humanoids because they walk upright and speak human languages, calling into question the sharp division between the human and animal. This essay traces how the show forces viewers to reimagine their relationship to nonhuman beings.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Wilderness and “Wilderpeople”: Ecotourist Adventures and the Marketing of Survival in Post-Colonial Film<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Amelia Chaney<\/p>\n

Wilderness survival fiction has historically enabled settlers to negotiate their colonial identities, particularly through archetypes like New Zealand\u2019s laconic bushman. However, even as such ecofiction, rooted in an imperial past, remains popular, I would argue that these types of survival narratives have paved the way for an alternative mode of contemporary expression, the ecotourist film, which combines the immersive spectacle of earlier accounts with a canny perception of environmentalism as both a marketable commodity and an ethical responsibility. The inherent tensions between the profit motives that drive movie production and the subject matter\u2019s potential to promote environmentalist values makes such films especially fraught sites for working through contemporary ideological conflicts over human\u2019s relationships with nature.<\/p>\n

Though recent criticism has identified the importance of location filming for global cinema, the role of eco-adventure films as a medium of environmentalist tourism remains largely undertheorized. In this paper, I will place Barry Crump\u2019s novel, Wildpork and Watercress<\/em> (1986), about a young M\u0101ori boy and an old P\u0101keh\u0101 woodsman evading police capture by hiding out in the bush in dialogue with its filmic adaptation, Taika Waititi\u2019s Hunt for the Wilderpeople<\/em> (2016). In place of the novel\u2019s stark ending prophesying the protagonist\u2019s death in a climbing accident, the film repackages the bush as a space of exuberant play, couching the rhetoric of environmentalist education in the guise of comedic romp. While it offers a compelling message about learning to live in tune with the bush, the movie nonetheless exhibits limitations, namely its appeals towards romantic escapism for audiences. Ultimately, such genre films I argue serve dual purposes providing a means of negoiating lingering tensions over land usage in countries scarred by long histories of racial violence and offering a reassuring psychological coping mechanism for disaster fatigue in an age anthropogenic crisis.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Christianity, Climate Change, and Cinema<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Everett Hamner<\/p>\n

This paper begins with a selection of key historical moments and theological assumptions that have shaped U.S. Christianity and especially evangelicals’ responses to climate change science. Then, it argues that if any progress is to be made in convincing the roughly quarter of American citizens who identify as evangelicals–80% of whom also voted for Donald Trump in 2016–to take seriously the threats represented by various dimensions of global ecological collapse, it will be critical to deconstruct epistemologically flawed rhetoric about “believing” or “not believing” in climate change and to utilize new terms like “global weirding” for describing the problems involved. Eventually, this paper turns to an analysis of how cli-fi at the movie theater has represented, influenced, and might yet reshape Christian and evangelical attitudes. Focusing on 2017-18 feature films, I will be particularly interested in juxtaposing the apocalyptic spectacle of films like\u00a0Geostorm\u00a0<\/em>with far more nuanced but also polarizing works like\u00a0Blade Runner 2049\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0mother!\u00a0<\/em>Whatever films I look at most closely, my aim will be to assess not only their individual suggestions about the imbrication of ecology and Christianity, but also to study their impact on evangelical audiences. Examining not just the films but also their uptake in popular evangelical journalism and various online settings, and glancing as well to some of the most influential steps taken by literary cli-fi, I seek to uncover what ecocinema is doing and might yet do in reshaping this subculture’s response to scientific reality.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Conceptualizing Speculative Aesthetics in Asian Ecocinema\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Kiu-wai Chu<\/p>\n

While the study of speculative fiction has long been an important topic in literary and film studies in the West (Canavan & Robinson 2014; Shaviro 2016; Latham 2017) or more recently, in transnational or global perspectives (Roh 2015; Feeley 2015), little work has been done in Asian context, and even less from ecocritical perspectives. In recent years we see a growing wave of Asian sci-fi films, as well as documentary films that share traits of speculative fictions. With excessive urbanization and economic development, and intensifying environmental degradations represented cinematically in both speculative narrative films, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul\u2019s Cementary of Splendour <\/em>(2015,Thailand); Minh Nguyen-Vo\u2019s NUOC 2030 <\/em>(2014, Vietnam); Jia Zhangke\u2019s Mountains May Depart <\/em>(2015, China) and Zhao Liang\u2019s documentary Behemoth<\/em> (2015, China). Focusing in some of the abovementioned films, this presentation aims to explore the following questions:<\/p>\n

How do Asian speculative fictions\/documentaries appear as a genre that reflect both cultural specificities and planetary concerns in the Anthropocene era? How do ecocritical films expand (or fail to expand) the scope from local, national perspectives to planetary, cosmic level, to cultivate what Confucian philosophers call the \u201canthropocosmic\u201d perspective? Can we conceptualize a speculative aesthetics of the Anthropocene in ecocinema and ecomedia, particularly in broad Asian contexts?<\/p>\n

Biography<\/p>\n

Kiu-wai Chu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture, Western Sydney University. He was previously SNSF Postdoctoral Fellow in University of Zurich. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature in University of Hong Kong, and his previous degrees from SOAS,\u00a0University of London, and University of Cambridge. He was a visiting Fulbright scholar in University of Idaho. His research focuses on contemporary cinema and art in Asia, Ecocriticism and environmental humanities.\u00a0His work has appeared in Transnational Ecocinema<\/em>; Ecomedia: Key Issues<\/em>, Journal of Chinese Cinemas<\/em>, Oxford Bibliographies <\/em>and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Canavan, Gerry and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Ficition. <\/em>Wesleyan University Press. 2014.<\/p>\n

Mackay, Robin, Luke Pendrell and James Trafford, eds. Speculative Aesthetics. <\/em>Urbanomic. 2014.<\/p>\n

Otto, Eric C. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. <\/em>Ohio State University. 2012.<\/p>\n

Salazar, Juan Francisco. \u201cAnticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film\u201d, A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film. <\/em>Eds by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. 2015.<\/p>\n

Shaviro, Steve. Discognition. <\/em>Repeater Books. 2015.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>War of the Sissies?: Redefining Heroism and Environmental Sustainability in Jeta Amata’s Black November\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Salawu Olajide<\/p>\n

The dominance of eco-annihilation as an issue in literary and artistic production from Niger\/Delta clearly signifies the deplorable state of the creek region of Nigeria\u2019s postcolony. While marking a positive upturn in the economic graph, several antithetic tragic outlines of environmental hazards such as oil spillage has become a conundrum to grapple with in the post-oil boom era. This thematic trademark permeates through the works of Niger\/Delta writers such as Ken-Saro Wiwa, Tanure Ojaide, Ibiwari Ikiriko, and Peter Uche Umez among others. One of the recent, if not the most significant, cinematic engagements on ecological tragedy of Niger\/Delta region is Jeta Amata\u2019s Black November<\/em>. The film is a huge contribution to the corpus of works and literary tradition of the Niger\/Delta region. Using Jeta Amata\u2019s Black November<\/em>, this paper argues that even when the environmental struggle of the region is more speculated and centred on male-ness, the selected film adequately deconstructs heroism and gender in the socio-historical history of the Niger\/Delta environmental struggle. As a theoretical drive for this paper, auteur theory is adopted. Furthermore, the paper shall also employ Spivak\u2019s postcolonial postulation, Can the Subaltern Speak?<\/em>, as a theoretical basis for engaging the assumed<\/em> gender silence as a response to issues of ecology in Nigeria . The paper concludes in the end that a painstaking perception on Niger\/Delta environmental struggle from both genders offers exhaustive insights into the body of scholarship on Nigerian eco-critical literature.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Performative Deferral and Climate Justice in\u00a0Parable of the Sower: The Opera\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Horka<\/p>\n

The late Octavia Butler\u2019s speculative fiction continues to inspire fiction writers, musicians, activists, and academics. A recent manifestation of Butler\u2019s afterlife is a musical adaptation of her Parable<\/em> novels in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Opera<\/em>. The opera\u2019s composer, Toshi Reagon (in collaboration with her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon), describes it as \u201cliving at the unprecedented intersection of science fiction, opera, African-American art & spirituality, feminism, and climate activism.\u201d This talk will argue that Butler\u2019s fiction calls for a response through its form and utopian sense of community, and that Reagon\u2019s opera takes up that call. Butler\u2019s parable form in the novels is vague, opening up a void of incompletion that can stimulate desires for re-creation, something I call performative deferral. The opera is an interactive experience between musicians, performers, and audience, providing an affective experience like that of the Earthseed community found in the novels, whose destiny is \u201cto take root among the stars.\u201d The opera\u2019s heterotopian experience of the Earthseed community offers a visceral sense for the horizon of the pleasures and pains of working for intersectional climate justice.<\/p>\n

This multi-generic expression of the opera\u2019s response is consistent with Black speculative cultural practices and to their relationship with social movements. In making these claims, I will build upon Andr\u00e9 Carrington\u2019s attention to Blackness in speculative fiction as inhabiting an interrelationship with visual and performance media, and upon Shelley Streeby\u2019s recent tracing of Black and Indigenous visionary speculative fiction in social movements invested in climate justice. Performative deferral contributes an analytical tool used to explain how speculative fictions provoke yearnings for justice and how these forms are re-created.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>A Monstrosity of Scales: The Shifting Spatiotemporalities and Anthropocentric Realities of Godzilla <\/i>and Kong: Skull Island\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Marchand<\/p>\n

As the recognition of the Anthropocene continues to spread its porous and sticky tentacles, new ways of approaching and representing how we view ourselves (humans) and our place in the world become increasingly necessary. Efforts in posthumanism, and, by extension the new materialisms, are actively attempting to decenter the human as the central figure of our investigations; however, many critics claim the Anthropocene, an umbrella term, \u00a0serves to re-center the human, in both space and time. Several films in the past decade have attempted to navigate this tension through a revisiting (rebooting) of past monstrous creature features; yet these narratives are often problematic at best, as man usually emerges as victor in these nature-strikes-back narratives. In this presentation, I argue that popular film, although indeed problematic, offers an effective medium for expressing the anxieties, tensions, and fears associated with anthropocenic realities through readings of Gareth Edward\u2019s 2014 Godzilla <\/em>and Jordan Vogt-Roberts\u2019s 2017 Kong: Skull Island<\/em>, the first two films in Legendary Entertainment\u2019s ongoing Monsterverse <\/em>franchise. I beging with a brief historical account of varying past manifestations of these \u2018so-called\u2019 monstrous figures, followed by a focused reading of these most recent incarnations. I suggest these films offer modes to think through the shifting spatial and temporal scales that our current ecological crisis demands, while attempting to navigate the constraints of spatial and temporal cinematic conventions, simultaneously. Although their ecological messages may be lost in translation (or mediation) to a generalized public; it has become imperative for ecomedia critics to unearth the sometimes underlying ecoethical significances such films struggle to express, in an attempt to help cultivate and propagate these shifting, and challenging, modes of scalar thinking in our continuing anthropogenic moment.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Silent Running <\/i>and the Metaphor of Spaceship Earth\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew Thompson<\/p>\n

During the awakening of the environmental movement following Rachel Carson\u2019s (1962) Silent Spring<\/em>, Hollywood saw a string of ecologically minded science fiction films produced. The Planet of the Apes<\/em> (1968), Silent Running <\/em>(1972), Soylent Green<\/em> (1973), and Logan<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Run <\/em>(1976) are examples of how the sci-fi genre was used as a tool to probe the consequences of ecological destruction in the present and in the future. This paper argues that North American image culture bridged the gap that separates the exploration of space from the preservation of the earth. These two pursuits, space travel and environmentalism, have fundamentally different aims; the former is focused outward, involves massive amounts of resources, and fetishizes science and technology, while the latter is self-reflexive, concerned with reducing the exploitation of natural resources, and wary of un-ethical science and technology. I argue that image media in general, and sci-fi eco-cinema from the 1970s in specific, brought these two contradictory modes of thought and material practices together in a way that reveals certain inconsistencies within the environmental movement.<\/p>\n

In order to demonstrate science fiction film\u2019s role in the environmental movement of the 1970s I will use one of the clearest examples, Silent Running<\/em>, as a case study. Reading Silent Running <\/em>alongside Buckminster Fuller\u2019s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth<\/em> (1969), will reveal the complicated environmental values that grew in the fecund interval between the space race and environmentalism. In the 1970s the metaphor of spaceship earth became synonymous with the images of the earth brought back from space by the Apollo missions. The metaphor and the images combine to emphasize the uniqueness, fragility, and beauty of our planetary environment. The film Silent Running <\/em>transforms the popular environmental figuration of spaceship earth into a science fiction narrative. The film is set on the Valley Forge<\/em>, a spaceship that contains within biodomes the last of certain earth ecosystems. By creating a literal equivalent to the metaphor of the earth as spaceship, Silent Running<\/em> allows for a reading of the trope that exposes certain contradictions within the environmental politics of the 1960s and 70s. Through an exploration of the relationship between the figure of metaphor and environmentalism, this paper asserts the important role that language serves in shaping our interactions with the nonhuman world. When Silent Running<\/em> takes the figure of spaceship earth and re-visualizes it as the Valley Forge,<\/em> the trope\u2019s utopian character is called into question.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Performing Precariousness on Thin Ice: Ecomedia and the Arctic Climate Crisis\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Senta Sanders<\/p>\n

Western nations continue to add to the precariousness of some lives at the expense of others rather than reinforcing the ethical dependence that humans have on each other in spite of their national and international borders. When considered through the scope of global climate change, it becomes clear that Judith Butler\u2019s notion of the precariousness of life not only augments Rob Nixon\u2019s concept of slow violence\u2014and vice versa\u2014but is also effectively embodied by it.<\/p>\n

A central trope of the Anthropocene Age, Nixon\u2019s concept of slow violence captures the delayed effects of transnational environmental injustices that occur gradually and out of sight, mainly affecting marginalized people and ecosystems. Nixon emphasizes the utter failure of those not directly affected by the ongoing affliction to acknowledge these seemingly impalpable injustices and wonders how the imperceptible environmental calamities of slow violence can be transformed into narratives that are powerful enough to incite public empathy and political intervention. Butler takes this a step further by pointing out that some that some lives may not be recognized as lives at all, thus emphasizing the need for visibility.<\/p>\n

Positioned within the intersecting spheres of postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice and cultural ecology, in this talk I will argue that by means of showing\u2014rather than merely telling\u2014the dire effects that global warming and toxic carbon-based contaminants have on the lives and lifestyles of marginalized, indigenous Arctic communities, contemporary environmental documentary films such as Gina Abatemarco\u2019s Kivalina<\/em> (2016) and Zacharias Kunuk\u2019s and Ian Mauro\u2019s, Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change<\/em> (2010) have succeeded at creating persuasive narratives of the human face of the climate crisis by means of enhancing visualization of slow violence that is transpiring at a fast-forwarded pace in the far North.<\/p>\n

Biography<\/p>\n

Senta Sanders is currently working on her Ph.D., which will examine contemporary narratives of the Arctic through the intersecting spheres of postcolonial ecocriticism, cultural ecology and environmental justice. She received her M.A. in English and American Literature and Anglophone Cultural Studies from the University of Augsburg. She has published on climate change in the Arctic and presented her research at international conferences in Leeds (2013), Roskilde (2015) and Tampere (2017). She is currently editing the forthcoming anthology Border Stories: Narratives of Peace, Conflict and Communication in the 20th and 21st<\/sup> Centuries<\/em>.\u00a0 Her fields of interest include ecocriticism, the postcolonial Arctic, climate change narratives and creative writing. She is a member of the Augsburg Cultural Ecology Research Group.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>“We Were Being Changed and Made Part of Their World”: Complicating the Human and Animal with Phase IV\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Isaac Rooks<\/p>\n

Using the cult classic Phase IV<\/em> (Saul Bass, 1974), this presentation explores how genre fiction contributes to the interrogation of humanity\u2019s relationship to the non-human, as well as the conceptual borders that define and divide those categories. This presentation draws attention to an understudied text while engaging genre fiction as an accessible entry point for important debates. Western thought has a long tradition of imaging the human as distinct from, and superior to, non-human animals. While critics like Donna Haraway do not dismiss the idea of differences between these groups, they argue that the anthropocentric \u201cGreat Divide\u201d separating them enables violence and requires dismantling. The important work of upending tradition in this manner potentially unsettles those used to the status quo. Genres like horror offer important venues for processing those cultural anxieties. Another point in horror\u2019s favor relates to its value as an illustrative tool; it takes abstract concepts and animates them vividly. In Phase IV<\/em>, the \u201cGreat Divide\u201d manifests as a melodramatic standoff between humans and insects, as two scientists investigate disturbances caused by a hyper-intelligent ant colony. The notion of the posthuman translates into our protagonists undergoing a literal transformation, communing with the other and becoming-ant. In most horror texts, the destruction of the human and the subversion of an anthropocentric order appears as a terrifying process. Phase IV <\/em>offers a nuanced and ambivalent take on the advent of posthumanism. It acknowledges the potentially distressing impact of this change, but does not condemn it. It does not presume to know what this new order will mean or look like, but it presents it as radically different and holding unique promises. It also presents change the only real option, as arrogant adherence to the old ways only leads to the literal destruction of the self and everything around it.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>To Instill a Love for Them: Plant Cinematography and Botanical Ethics<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

John Ryan<\/p>\n

Written and narrated by David Attenborough, and released in 2012, the documentary Kingdom of Plants 3D<\/em> was filmed over one year at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. It incorporated advances in time-lapse cinematography and other techniques, such as infrared, to render the lives of plants visible to viewers. The audience metamorphosed into active participants when, for instance, tablets could be employed to accelerate and reverse flowering, as part of the documentary project. A review of the film in The Guardian<\/em> implies the aptness of time-lapse to expressing the particular beingness of plants, commenting that \u201cit\u2019s only when you speed them up that they reveal their true nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding its technical chic, \u00a0Attenborough\u2019s documentary can be regarded as a relatively recent incarnation of the more-than-100-year-old lineage of\u00a0 \u201cplant cinematography\u201d (Petterson 2011, 90) within the broader context of the \u201cenvironmental documentary\u201d tradition (Duvall 2017; Hughes 2014). Most notably, the British naturalist and filmmaker Frank Percy Smith innovated time-lapse techniques in landmark documentaries such as Birth of a Flower <\/em>(1911) and The Germination and Plants<\/em> (1911), becoming one of the first cinematographers to record the opening of a bud. Moreover, in 1912, the photographer Arthur Clarence Pillsbury produced a time-lapse film to advocate the protection of Yosemite wild flowers threatened with extinction. Pillsbury aimed to \u201cinstill a love for them, a realization of their life struggles so similar to ours, and a wish to do something to stop the ruthless destruction of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Invoking theorizations from the field of critical plant studies (for example, Marder 2014), this paper will examine the extent to which contemporary botanical cinematography promotes ethics through its mediation of vegetal life. An ethical regard for plants\u2014one grounded in scientific principles of vegetal intelligence\u2014provides a countermeasure to the aestheticization of flowers. In developing my analysis, I will refer to prominent examples of botanical documentary filmmaking of the last thirty years, including Our Botanical Biosphere <\/em>(1990), The Private Life of Plants <\/em>(1995), In the Mind of Plants<\/em> (2008) and The Botany of Desire<\/em> (2009).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>The Wild Bunch: Women’s Survival Narratives<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Virginia Luzon-Aguado<\/p>\n

When considering films set in the wilderness, or dealing with survival in the wilderness, films like Deliverance <\/em>(1972), Into the Wild <\/em>(2007) and The Revenant<\/em> (2015) come readily to mind. Upon closer consideration of these titles, there is an element that becomes evident, and that is the lack of women playing the main roles. Indeed, a quick internet search for survival films, which are generally set in the wilderness, reveals the intensely masculinist outlook of this type of film, which is generally thought of as a subgenre of the action-adventure narrative, from which women leads have remained largely absent to this date. In cultural terms, femininity does not seem to be compatible with mobility, adventure and survival in the wilderness. Indeed, in patriarchal western societies, (Mother) Nature has been socially constructed as a resource to be tamed and exploited and has therefore provided fertile ground for the representation of myriad narratives of mastering masculinity.<\/p>\n

However, what happens when these narratives are led by women? What drives women into the wild? How do they confront the perils of nature? How do they survive in the wild? How do they adapt? This paper proposes to address these issues by focusing on those narratives that deal with adventure and\/or survival in the wilderness from a female perspective. It will therefore attempt to consider the representation of women\u2019s hands-on experience with nature and\/or their survival strategies in the wild through a reading of such titles as Meek\u2019s Cutoff <\/em>(2010), The Hunger Games<\/em> (2012), Tracks <\/em>(2013), Wild <\/em>(2014) and Endless Night <\/em>(2015).<\/p>\n

The analysis will be carried out from two different perspectives. On the one hand, the individual films selected for analysis will be dissected from a generic perspective by focusing particularly on the ways in which the presence of a female lead contributes to a specific construction and reading of the narrative. As a corollary, an eco-critical feminist perspective will also be employed in order to consider whether or not women engage with life and survival in the wilderness in markedly different ways.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

<\/a>Shooting Location, Cine-Hydrology, and The Revenant<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Mario Trono<\/p>\n

In this \u201cpaper\u201d\u2014 which will actually manifest (thanks to the adventurous conference format) as a blend of visual essay and spoken-word critique\u2014I will undertake the following:<\/p>\n