CFP: Workshop in Munich, Germany

Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema

Conveners: Alexa Weik von Mossner and Arielle Helmick
Location: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany
Date: July 22-23, 2011

This workshop is interested in new research projects at the interface of film and media studies and ecocriticism which are concerned with the relation between emotion, affect, environment, and cinema. Emotion, as researchers in environmental psychology, neuroscience, and social anthropology have shown, is the basic mechanism that connects us to our environment, a mechanism that shapes our knowledge and motivates our actions. Given this central importance of affect and emotion in human-environment relationships, ecocinema emerges as a particularly fruitful site for investigation. Of crucial importance to ecocinema studies are both how films represent human emotional relationships to the more-than-human world as well as how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions.

How does ecocinema represent human emotion and affect in relation to different environments? How do these films influence our emotions both during and after viewing, and how do they generate meanings? How do such films affect our relationship to the human and more-than-human world and what can we say about their affective or “passionate” politics? These are some of the questions we hope to address in this workshop.

We invite paper proposals on topics including, but not limited to the following, all in relation to film and related visual media:

• Filmic landscape as emotional space
• Dangerous and endangered environments
• Environment, embodiment, and emotion
• Environmental memory and affect
• Melodrama and sentimentalism
• Affective attachment and animality
• Affective viewer response and the empathic imagination
• Emotional politics of ecocinema

Applications and papers must be written in English. Discussions at the workshop will be based on precirculated papers which will be due approximately six weeks before the workshop.

There are plans to publish an edited collection based on the workshop; selected papers will be considered for inclusion.

The workshop “Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion and Ecocinema” is supported by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Travel and accommodation costs will be met by the organizers.

Detailed abstracts (600-800 words) for papers and a short CV should be submitted by email no later than Jan 31, 2011 to:

Alexa Weik von Mossner:
alexa.weik@carsoncenter.lmu.de

For further information on organizational issues please contact:

Arielle Helmick
arielle.helmick@carsoncenter.lmu.de

The Rachel Carson Center is a joint initiative of LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research.