Last night, while watching the Golden Globes, I was struck by an Exxon Mobile ad that began, “Here’s a question for you. Is your TV powered by coal?” On an evening that NBC/Universal did not emphasize their “Green is Universal” marketing campaign and none of the presenters or award winners I saw made comments about ecological issues, this Exxon ad gave me pause to consider how my TV is powered. Here in Western Oregon, our primary source of energy is hydroelectric energy generated by a series of large dams on the Columbia River. According to the statistics provided by the Exxon ad, this means I am one of just 13% of energy consumer’s in the United States whose TV is powered by renewable energy. According to Exxon, 39% of our electricity comes from coal, 28% from natural gas, 19% from nuclear, 13% from renewables, and 1% from oil.
I find it interesting that the ExxonMobile ad looked more like a public service announcement than a marketing pitch, a savvy move fro the company give the audience it is trying to reach with these ads. These types of ads, which I have seen recently from Chevron, BP, and other petroleum giants seem primarily designed to keep us from asking deeper questions about these companies, to lull us into a false sense of security as we drive down the highway and stop to fill our tanks. Yet on an evening dedicated to celebrating celebrity, I found it ironic that the ad provided the best way into the conversation about environmental change, fossil fuel consumption, and even giving me pause to step back and recognize that even the renewable energy powering my TV has come at a steep price – particularly to the native tribes whose way of life was forever altered when the great Columbia fisheries at places like Celilo Falls were dammed (damned!) to give way for The Dalles Dam and other hydroelectric generators along the river.
The ad got me thinking about how I can make a more focused effort to use cultural studies pedagogy such as Stuart Hall’s work on dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings to encourage students to make similar connections as they consume mainstream media.
Environments, Spaces and Transformations
Thursday 5th – Friday 6th June 2014
Inaugural MFCO Early Career-Graduate Conference hosted by the Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand
Keynote speakers: Dr Fiona Allon, University of Sydney & Associate Professor Vijay Devadas, University of Otago Conference organisers: Maud Ceuterick and Alex Thong
This interdisciplinary conference invites papers addressing the shifting relations between environments, spaces and their transformations. Environment and space are critically contested concepts for understanding contemporary societies, locally and globally, and scholars have assigned ever-shifting meanings and significations to them. Environments evolve and transform, but what impact do they have on societies and cultures? Similarly, spaces continuously change, but how do they generate new identities and different relations between people and their socio-politico and economic environments? Additionally, transformations might refer to the production of space for inducing change, changing socio-cultural and economic practices, technological interventions in various environments, or progressive politics re-orienting deep-rooted social stratifications. In fact, recently emergent formations such as the green economy, spatial thinking, critical environmentalism, and new materialism, to name a few, continue to give rise to multi-faceted debates around environments, spaces and notions of transformation.
We invite post-graduates and early career scholars to explore how interrelations between environments, spaces and transformations open toward a multitude of sites for dialogue across disciplines and practices. Possible areas of inquiry include:
• Mediated environments • Environments, space and politics • Citizenship, space and environment(s) • Filmic narratives of environment, space and transformation • Transformations in cinematic spaces • Space, place and gender • Spaces, transformations and their implications for mobility and gender • Environment and space in the archives • Philosophical approaches to space • Digital Environments • Implications of biotechnology • Neoliberal spaces • Representations of environments • Transforming ethics and value • Science, ethics and politics • Travel, tourism and the environment • Socio-cultural impacts of landscape and spatial modifications
Deadline for abstracts: 20th February 2014. Responses will be given by 28th February 2014.
We invite abstracts of 250-350 words along with a short (100 word) author bio, from areas of study such as anthropology, geography, media, film studies, communications, biology, science communication, history, sociology, gender studies, political science, philosophy, art history, physics, climate sciences, phenomenology, law, architecture, tourism, postcolonial and indigenous studies.
Registration: Free. Tea and coffee provided. There will be a conference dinner on Thursday 5th June at the cost of $25 NZ/person payable in cash on the opening day. We will contact you regarding registration and dinner attendance.
Publication: Selected papers will be offered for publication in the refereed Working Paper Series of the Department of Media Film and Communication. Papers will take the form of a 20-minute presentation and 10-minute question and answer session. Panel suggestions are welcome.
Please send abstracts to Maud Ceuterick and Alex Thong at mfco_ecg@otago.ac.nz<mailto: mfco_ecg@otago.ac.nz>
Masterclass: Postgraduates will also be invited to attend a Masterclass with Dr. Fiona Allon on Wednesday 4th June 2014. Indicate if you wish to participate. Those attending the masterclass will be asked to submit a research proposal and short biography.
Stephanie LeMenager’s latest book, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Here is a brief description taken from the OUP website.:
Living Oil is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels and memoirs. The book’s unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil’s omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and Aspirin tablets. The book makes a strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, non-human lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petro-culture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American Century.
Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States.
Could be a great opportunity for a recent PhD to make a unique contribution to ecomedia studies if you can convince the application committee that you work is suited to the appointment.
Mellon post-doctoral fellowship in Race and the Environment Brown University
The Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University invite applications for a two-year Mellon post-doctoral fellowship in Race and the Environment. The successful candidate will interrogate the integration of race and inequality with Environmental Studies and environmental justice. Ideally, s/he will work (or at least teach) transnationally. Applicants must have received their degrees from institutions other than Brown within the last five (5) years. The successful candidate must show exceptional scholarly promise and will be expected to teach one course a semester on an agreed topic in Africana Studies related to their position, with the possibility of cross-listing with the relevant units. The fellow will be located in the Department of Africana Studies and is expected to interact with units relevant to her/his core discipline. S/he will also be affiliated with the Cogut Center, where s/he will participate in Center activities.
Fellows have the opportunity to interact with Brown faculty affiliated with the Center, to participate in fellows’ seminars, lectures, and conferences, and to participate in the planning of working groups and large scale seminars on various topics. The Center seeks to provide a stimulating scholarly environment in which to pursue research, develop new interdisciplinary connections, and network with others. The appointment will begin on July 1, 2014, or as soon as possible thereafter. Receipt of the Ph.D. is expected by the time of appointment.
Fellows receive stipends of $61,449 the first year and a $63,907 the second year, plus standard fellow benefits and a $2000 per year research budget. Interested candidates should send a letter of application, syllabi and/or detailed descriptions of courses s/he has prepared (and/or a list of possible courses), a curriculum vitae, a writing sample (no more than 30 pages) and three letters of reference, by 15 February 2014 via Interfolio <apply.interfolio.com/24124>.
Brown University is an EEO/AA employer. Women, minorities, and international scholars are encouraged to apply.
Landscape and Environment
Call for papers
The 24th International Screen Studies Conference is organised by the journal Screen and will be programmed by Screen editors Alison Butler and Alastair Phillips.
From their earliest inception, film and television have been concerned with the registration of place through the unique capacity of the audiovisual moving image to convey the experience of locale over time. In recent years, screen studies has engaged with the politics of location especially through the site of the cinematic city and inter-related questions of modernity, architecture and urban cultural transformation. The main theme of this year’s Screen conference will offer an opportunity to extend critical debate into the fields of landscape and the environment. In so doing, it will offer an exciting range of inter-disciplinary perspectives in order to reflect on the real and imaginary ways that we interact with the world through the portal of the screen.
Martin Lefebvre has argued that landscape manifests itself as an interpretative gaze. It is anchored in human life not just as something to look at but to live in socially as a cultural form. Cultural geography now argues that landscape must not only be understood as the outcome of interactions of nature and culture, but that practices of landscaping such as walking, looking, driving and, of course, filmmaking might also be the origin of our ideas about what ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ actually are. If human investment toward space produces the notion of landscape, what then are the principal ways in which the moving image articulates this process? How have film and television articulated the necessary tension between embodied immersion within a specific topographical space and critical reflection on the specific historical and cultural contexts that shape global screen culture past and present?
The confirmed plenary speakers are:
Professor Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London
Professor Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent
Professor Mette Hjort, Lingnan University, Hong Kong/University of Copenhagen
Janine Marchessault, York University
The Screen Studies Conference, one of the longest running and most successful events of its kind in the world, welcomes proposals for papers/panels on any of these questions and on the following topics related to the main conference theme (as usual, proposals for other subjects beyond this focus will also be considered):
- The representation of geographically and historically specific screen landscapes
- Environmental politics and screen cultures
- Genre, narrative and the landscape
- Phenomenology and screen landscapes
- Landscape and television culture
- Journeys and landscapes: walking and travelling on screen
- The landscapes of world cinema
- Landscape and environment: autobiography, history, memory
- Screen cultures within the environment
- The dialectics of place and non-place in film and video
- Site-specific screening practices
The deadline for submitting proposals is Friday, 10th January 2014. Submissions for pre-formed three-person panels will be considered but not prioritised. Individual papers from pre-formed panels may be accepted although the panel is rejected.
Instructions for individual proposals
Please submit your proposal on the following template, then save it with your surname as the filename, and email to screen@arts.gla.ac.uk, using the email subject line, “SSC2014 proposal”. Download SSC2014 single proposal template.
Instructions for pre-formed panel proposals
All panel members should submit a separate proposal, using the following panel template, saving it with their surname as the filename. In addition, in Section 2, they should give the name of a main panel contact for correspondence, and the title and rationale of the proposed panel. The main panel contact may forward the panel’s files in a single email, but please ensure contact details are complete for each panel member within the attachments. Download SSC2014 panel proposal template.
If you have any queries about the submission process, please contact Heather Middleton, Screen Administrator, at screen@arts.gla.ac.uk or 0141 330 5035.
Gilmorehill Centre, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK
tel: +44 (0)141 330 5035
fax: +44 (0)141 330 3515
email: screen@arts.gla.ac.uk
Nature in Motion: Cinematic Ecologies and Environments
St Andrews, 20.-21. February 2014
8th NECS Graduate Workshop
Hosted by the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews
20-21 February 2014
Call for Papers
At the end of the nineteenth century, one critic remarked that, in film, we are able to see “nature caught in the act.†Indeed, cinema and nature seem linked in powerful and complex ways. From proto-cinematic applications in the field of biological motion studies and contemporary visualizations of climate models, to popular documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and more experimental work such as Leviathan (2012), the moving image continues to profoundly shape how we see and understand nature and the natural world. Furthermore, the cinema manifests a provocative paradox: it is a supremely artificial phenomena, unimaginable apart from the modern scientific and technological advances that have enabled the almost-total domination of nature by human activity. Nevertheless, cinematic representations can produce what are arguably the most successfully ‘naturalistic’ images available to the plastic arts. Moreover, the cinema itself interacts with a network of other technologies of communication and representation–a veritable media ecosystem as complex as any found in nature.
As both these media and our planet undergo rapid changes in the twenty-first century, the relationship between them, and indeed, between the ecosphere and the human techno-social sphere, calls out for new practical approaches and integrated theoretical understanding. How, for instance, might we understand the exhaustion of the celluloid medium in the face of new digital cinematic technologies in parallel with the depletion of the Earth’s resource reserves and the call for new alternative energy technologies? What does the cinema’s replacement of physical reality with virtual, computer-generated, imagery suggest about our current relationship to the material world?
NECS invites doctoral candidates and early-career researchers to submit proposals for contributions addressing these and related topics, including, but not limited to:
Theoretical Issues:
Nature and classical film theory (Bazin, Benjamin, Kracauer, etc.)
Contemporary cinematic ecocriticism
Cinema and ecosophy (Heidegger and “the world pictureâ€, Næss and ‘Deep Ecology’, etc.)
Media ecology: Spaces of cinema exhibition (expanded cinema and environmental technologies, etc.)
Representational Issues:
Cinema and geological time, landscape, or animal/non-human performers
Special effects and the cinematic sublime
Comparative studies of environmental content in commercial cinema versus the avant-garde
Disaster films and ecological crises
Documentary rhetoric and environmental activism
Practical Issues:
Film production and its environmental impact
Cinema as tool for executing or communicating scientific/environmental research
The moving image’s application in environmental/life sciences
—
Submissions deadline: December 31th, 2013
Please address abstracts (300-500 words) along with institutional affiliation and brief biographical note to: graduates@necs.org Notification will follow shortly thereafter.
The conference language is English.
Participants will need to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. Travel information as well as a list of affordable hotels and other accommodation will be provided in the beginning of January.
Conference attendance is free, but valid NECS-membership is required to participate.
Participants must register with NECS at www.necs.org and pay their fee by February 1st. For the terms of NECS membership, please also refer to our website.
NECS Graduate Workshop Organizers:
Dr. Miriam De Rosa (Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Milan)
Heath Iverson, Doctoral Candidate (University of St Andrews)
Alena Strohmaier, Doctoral Candidate (Philipps-University Marburg)
As a Hulu subscriber, I have noticed for a while now that internet tv, unlike broadcast tv, does not typically run public service ads. That situation is finally starting to change, at least on Hulu, thanks to Platform Breathe, a nonprofit based in NY City. Platform Breathe was started in 2007 by Andy Jennison, Kenny Pedini and Michael Schwartz. The goal is to give back to both the community and film and television industry through public service advertising.
Platform Breath’s current campaign – “Now” – features ads on clean energy, food deserts, litter, child advocacy, and community involvement. All of the ads encourage immediate action to address social and environmental issues. Some of the ads have been critiqued for being a bit over the top, but for now I’m just happy to know they’ve broken into a market that is otherwise bereft of public service ads. At least these are coming from the ground up rather than the top down.
Here’s a sample:
Australian officials have expressed serious concern about musician Katy Perry’s latest album.
It isn’t the lyrics that concern them bu
t the materials used in the packaging and promotion. In early November, at the same time Perry’s album hit number one on the ARIA charts and the singer herself was skyrocketing to number one in popularity on social media sites and performing to packed crowds in Australia, news broke in the Sydney Morning Herald that Australian biosecurity officers had been dispatched to begin tracking down imported editions of Perry’s album Prism as they entered the country.
The album contains a form of handmade paper embedded with wildflower seeds. The idea is to encourage listeners to act on their urge to “let it shine” (as the lyrics of Perry’s most famous song decree) by planting the seeds and spreading good feelings and energy.
The problem is that although the Australian version of the album was vetted to ensure that all of the seeds came from native species, the US and international versions of the album were not vetted to ensure that any seeds used would not pose the risk of becoming invasive species if they were imported into Australia and elsewhere. Many Australians use Amazon and other sources to purchase imported albums, hence raising the ire of biosecurity officials.
It’s a great reminder that the material, textual, and cultural are intertwined.