The contest is open to anyone who prepares a short, funny video for YouTube, which communicates a clear message about climate change.
Submissions must:
- Be humorous!
- Address the issue of climate change. We are interpreting the topic very broadly, so it includes topics like disasters, fossil fuels, clean energy, wildlife (like polar bears), politics, deniers, and so on.
- Reach a broad audience.
- Be an original production.
- Be less than three minutes (including titles and credits).
- Posted to Eco-Comedy Video Competition 2013 YouTube Channel at:Â http://www.youtube.com/user/ecocomedy2013.
- Submitted by 11:59pm Eastern Time Zone on Friday, March 1, 2013.
There will be six judges representing the Center for Environmental Filmmaking, Sierra Club, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Mill Reef Productions, and EcoSense. The decision of the judges is final. Awards are based on overall merit of the entries. Judges reserve the right not to grant an award. The organizations listed above reserve the right to post submissions on their websites.
Submissions that are not received by Friday, March 1, 2013 will not be accepted. The winner will be announced at American University on Tuesday, March 19 at the DC Environmental Film Festival at 7:00pm in the Wechsler Theater. ** $1,000 Prize **
For more information regarding submission guidelines and contest rules, visit: http://www.american.edu/soc/cef/eco-comedy-film-competition.cfm
Questions may be addressed to Chris Palmer at palmer@american.edu.
Energy independence has been a hot button issue of late, gaining attention from both the political left and right. For the left, energy independence signals a recognition of climate change and our society’s addiction to oil. For the right, it signals a move away from having our economy and military policy subjected to the whims of political and religious turmoil in the Middle East. As a result, energy production in the United States has ramped up dramatically over the past few years, a fact made visible in films like Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land and by the rows upon rows of 200+ foot tall wind turbine towers dotting the landscape in places like the Columbia Gorge in Oregon and Snake River Plain in Idaho. North Dakota, in particular, has become a hub of activity as the relatively new technology of fracking has opened up new access to oil and natural gas. North Dakota’s economy is booming but at what cost?
In an innovative use of interactive media, independent producer Todd Melby has teamed up with Prairie Public, Zeega, and AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, Incorporated to produce BLACK GOLD BOOM, an interactive video website in which viewers can navigate a series of documentaries on the changes occurring to the landscape, economy, and culture of North Dakota. Particularly disturbing is the way in which young women, who have been lured to work in service industry jobs, are being treated by workers in bars, restaurants, and other social gathering points. Rather than taking sides, however, BLACK GOLD BOOM offers those involved in the industry the chance to tell their stories and explain why they are moving to North Dakota in droves to exploit the oil/gas rush before it is tapped out.
To get a sense of the scale at which the oil/gas industry is operating in North Dakota at the present moment, check out this image of the ‘Kuwait of the West’ from a recent blog post entitled “A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark” by Robert Krulwich, National Public Radio correspondent.
An ambitious initiative ‘The Anthropocene Project’ opened last week involving leading thinkers, scientists and artists, from a range of disciplines coming together for an innovative two year study  10.01.2013 – 31.12.2014, curated by the House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin. This is an important, albeit overdue, initiative in that significant cross-disciplinary activity across the humanities is finally linking with science at such a high level. Sociologist William R. Catton Jnr, who as early as the mid 1980s established that humanity was ‘overshooting’ its planetary boundaries (in his highly regarded book of the same name), also identified as a chief difficulty of our age the ‘cultural lag’ of contemporary society in realising the urgent necessity to engage in overshoot concerns, despite decades of scientific information supporting such views. Robust eco-literacy in the humanities is also overdue, if only to facilitate the beginnings of understanding that the Earth’s degradation is not just a result of resource exploitation or humanity’s large numbers, but ultimately driven by the anthropocentric-dominant, cultural paradigms of industrial society, that have greatly blinded our acknowledgement of the intrinsic values of, and inter-dependencies we have, with other non-human species and ecological systems.
The Host City: (Re)Locating Media Events in the Network Era
Guest Editor: Robert Moses Peaslee, Texas Tech University
Assistant Guest Editor: Brendan Kredell, University of Calgary
As media events (Couldry, Hepp & Krotz, 2010; Dayan & Katz,1992) of all stripe proliferate around the world, a variety of stakeholdersjockey for position and advantage in the geographical and cultural contextschosen to host them. Media events, as Dayan and Katz famously characterizedthem, were defined in part by their liveness, their physical remoteness from the majority of their ?audience,? their interruptive nature, and their status, nonetheless, as pre-planned (prominent examples today would include the Olympic games, the annual film festival at Cannes, the Super Bowl, and music festivals such as Chicago?s Lollapalooza). Many of these events are consistently located, well-established and have assumed a defensive position aimed at maintainingbrand identity and prestige. Others, such as the Olympics, change locations, while others (such as Austin, TX?s Fantastic Fest) are ascendant, and still others are nascent at best. Each host community, however, has a unique relationship
to their event(s), and each of these relationships provides fertile ground for investigating the role of media events in promoting discourses of community identity, establishing infrastructural and externalnetworks, reifying the importance of being mediated, utilizing the “local? to speak “globally,? and a variety of other processes.
This special issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture seeks research articles engaging the media events literature and investigating the relationship between event and location, between location-as-text and location-as-infrastructure, between location and audience, between location and industry, and other relevant relationships, all in the context of networked media structures. Some relevant topics areas include, but are by no means limited to:
Host city branding and image management
Networked media events: the impact of social media
Media events and host city governance
Discourses of place in the media event
?Thereness? and virtuality in the media event
Media events as sites of resistance
Community and ritual
Media events, promotion and (g)local media
Fannish practices in/around the media event
The political economy of the media event
The audience experience: affect, memory, place
Media events and mobility
Comparative analyses of host cities in media event contexts
Prospective authors should submit an abstract of approximately 500 words no later than January 15, 2013 to robert.peaslee@ttu.edu<mailto:robert.peaslee@ttu.edu>. Abstracts will be reviewed by the editors on a rolling basis until then.
Those authors whose abstracts are accepted will be required to submit full articles of 6000-7000 words (inclusive of notes, appendices, and works cited) no later than March 15, 2013.
Articles will be subject to a blind peer-review process, meaning that acceptance of an abstract does not denote acceptance of the full article. We anticipate accepting approximately 12 abstracts in order to produce an issue of 6-7 articles.
Any revisions required by the reviewers will be expected by mid-June in order to publish the issue in early 2014.
Authors wishing to propose relevant book reviews for the issue should also submit an abstract by January 15, 2013.
Questions and abstracts should be directed to robert.peaslee@ttu.edu.
Also, anyone interested in serving as a reviewer should send a brief letter of interest along with a CV to bkredell@ucalgary.ca.
The Discovery Channel and Japan’s NHK media outlet have released the first video images ever taken of a giant squid in its natural habitat. The footage, which will air in its complete form in an upcoming Discovery documentary was captured 2000 feet below the ocean surface off the coast of Japan. NPR, US News, and other media outlets are covering the story. The footage is the result of a joint effort by Japanese and US scientists, which began in earnest after Japanese zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera took photographs of a giant squid in 2004.
Deadline:Â April 1, 2013
Melting glacial ice reminds us of the North’s role in global climate change. Detritus from the 2010 Japanese tsunami reveals the ring-of-fire traffic of economies, risks, species, bodies, and waste. Environments and communities in the North disproportionately bear the costs of the planet’s dependency on oil. It is clear that the North is not an isolated, anachronistic, pristine, exceptional, or “authentic†space, as prevailing assumptions hold. As this collection seeks to demonstrate, the North is a dynamic, transnational, connected and contested space where natures, identities, histories, and politics constantly intersect.
We seek proposals for scholarly essays that address “the North†in these new and illuminating ways. Concerns often associated with the North—melting icebergs, oil development, and indigeneity, for example—are overwhelmingly approached from perspectives in the natural and social sciences, making questions about the truth of climate science, the validity of traditional ecological knowledge, or the cost-benefits of oil development projects dominate our thinking about the region. This book seeks to add an environmental humanities perspective and thereby challenge prevailing assumptions about Northern concerns, and even what counts as “the North†to begin with.
By understanding the North through perspectives that might seem mismatched at first glance—urban ecology, technology, postmodernity, globalization, post- and neo-colonialism, new media or popular culture, minority or migrant species and communities, reproductive justice, and queer ecologies, to name a few—this collection seeks to put Northern studies in dialogue with these important theoretical fields.
Some questions we seek to explore are:
·     Why “the North,†and how does “the North†serve as shorthand for other assumptions?
·     What voices, perspectives, and texts are left out of dominant understandings of the North?
·     How is the North connected to other places, yet, somewhat paradoxically, an exceptional geography?
·     What might Northern studies contribute to environmental inquiries, and what might emerging scholarship in environmental humanities offer studies of the North?
The intended audience for this collection is humanistic scholars interested in a critical environmental cultural studies approach to the North, especially the region understood as the North American North. We seek to appeal to scholars in the fields of environmental humanities, environmental literary studies, ecocinema studies, Canadian Studies, American Studies, indigenous studies, environmental justice, tourism and leisure studies, critical human geography, movement and spatial justice studies, and language and colonialism, and especially welcome proposals by Canadian or other scholars outside the U.S. University of Alaska Press has expressed interest in publishing this collection.
Proposals may address the following topics:
·     Geographical imaginaries of the North
·     Movement and migration
·     Queer ecologies
·     Reproductive justice, population, gender
·     Security, scarcity, risk, or military
·     Cold/dark ecologies
·     The North and eco-apocalypse
·     Representations of the North—literary, film, or new media
·     Technology, urbanization, or postmodernity
·     The study, use, and changing role of traditional ecological knowledges
·     Embodiment
·     Time, nostalgia, anachronism, slow violence, or temporality
·     Petrocultures and petronatures
·     Post-humanism
·     The North versus the South, “other†Norths, eco-cosmopolitanism and the North
·     The global North and/or Northern exceptionalism
·     Globalization and transnationalism
·     Food security and food justice
·     Social movements and protest
·     Indigeneity and modernity
·     Border studies
·     The toxic North
·     Northern perspectives on environmental humanities
Please submit a paper proposal of approximately 500 words and a brief biography to editors Kevin Maier (kevin.maier@uas.alaska.edu) and Sarah Jaquette Ray (sjray@uas.alaska.edu) by no later than April 1, 2013.
International Membership Grants provide assistance to scholars who, through higher education, are seeking to advance their knowledge of the field of literature and environment. Membership benefits include contact with other scholars through our membership database, access to the scholarly and creative writing in the field through a subscription to our journal ISLE, and access to the resources and information about the field and our organization in our quarterly newsletter ASLE News, among others.
For more details about the grant (legibility, award information, and application specifics) please visit ASLE website’s Resources page.
Perhaps the most exquisite, artistic, and well-crafted film of Taiwan’s so-called “Golden Age†of cinema (1964-9) is none other than Li Hanxiang’s (æŽç¿°ç¥¥) 1969 film The Winter 《冬暖》. In their book Taiwan Film Directors, Emilie Yeh and Darrell William Davis briefly describe the film as a “sad, sweet story about a mainland émigré†in which Li “exhibits a stunning, fluid studio craftsmanship in his re-creation of a vernacular, parochial Taipei†(44-45). At the SCMS conference in Chicago in March, I’ll be presenting an aesthetic analysis of Li’s film using primary sources from late 1960s Taiwan, focusing my study within the film’s historical-material context, while using the lens of ecocriticism in order to reveal the ways in which Li’s fragmented images of urban Taipei generate a sense of anxiety and tension that is ultimately resolved by contrasting representations of nature. The images of nature also correlate in interesting ways with archetypal imagery of the Buddha as a peaceful, transcendent source of liberation. Li’s aesthetic sensibility is significant not only because he provides apt metaphors for both the narrative conflict and resolution, but, in terms of Taiwan’s economic development, Li’s film seems to foreshadow the environmental destruction that would result from rampant industrialization in the following decades as well as convey a sense of freedom impossible to realize during a time of political repression.