ASLE 2013 CFP: Climate Justice, Indigenous Peoples and Collective Action
In collaboration with the International Association of Environmental Philosophy (IAEP),
Janet Fiskio (Oberlin College) and Kyle Powys Whyte (Michigan State University) are soliciting papers for a panel at the forthcoming ASLE 2013 conference.
See the particulars of their call, cross-listed at the ASLE Diversity Caucus blog.
Correction: Job Announcement: UConn English/EVST/Digital Humanities Assistant Professor
Please note that the non-US restriction has been dropped from the UConn Assistant Prof position, advertised earlier here.
A shout out for the ImagineNATIVE film festival that I attended this past week. While not officially designated an eco-film festival, there is plenty in the films screened (as I argue more generally about indigenous film festivals) to pique the interest of any ecomedia scholar.
While feature length films such as Katja Gauriloff’s Canned Dreams, an aesthetically stunning and unnerving rumination on global food systems, and Dung, Tibetan Lance No’s experimentation with observation documentary, speak explicitly and powerfully to environmental themes, it was the shorts, many made by upcoming and emerging young indigenous artists, with their implicit eco-sensibilities that really captured me. From Miranda de Pencier’s heart-wrenching Throat Song to Jules Koostachin’s NiiPii and Anne Merete Gaup’s Eahparas eerie resonances, and the more tongue-in-cheek tones of Kent Monkman’s Dance to Miss Chief and Tiffany Parker’s Scar, ecology is well and alive in the cinematic imaginations of these filmmakers, a number of whom I had the privilege of speaking with. A special thanks to all who were kind enough to take the time to be interviewed (including Jason Ryle, the Executive Director; and Alanis Obomsawin, a stalwart in the field.)
If the festival films come touring in your vicinity, I’d highly recommend attending.
Next week on most Public Broadcasting stations, Frontline will be airing “A Climate of Doubt” special report on the ever-changing public debate on climate change. The issue has been completely ignored during both U.S. presidential debates and the vice presidential debate so I’ll be tuning in to hear the PBS take on public opinion and the role of media pundits and think tanks in shaping the debate. The candidates did address the issues in their convention speeches, with Mitt Romney using the issue as a laugh line and Barack Obama claiming it is not a hoax. At least NPR is not ignoring the issue, thanks to the reporting of Richard Harris. I’m not sure I agree that there has been a “reversal” in public opinion as green consumerism is hotter than ever but it is clearly not on the minds of the mainstream media. Frontline promises to look behind the issue to the uncover the reasons why public interest seems to have waned. Clearly, the global economic recession and massive job losses have to be a primary reason, but as Frontline uncovers, rhetoric and politics have played a key role as well. Here’s a description of the program:
“Only four years ago, politicians from both parties, pressed by an anxious public, seemed poised to act on climate change. But that was then. Today, public opinion about climate change has cooled, and many politicians either ignore the issue or loudly proclaim their skepticism of diverse scientific evidence that human activity is imperiling the planet. What’s behind this reversal? John Hockenberry (host of The Takeaway on NPR radio) goes inside the organizations that fought to shift the direction of debate on climate issues and redefine the politics of global warming.”
If you’re in Seattle this October, you may want to check out artist Abby Aresty’s new installation “Paths II: The Music of Trees”. According to Abby’s statement on the project website, the installation is “a series of sound installations that explore the layers and permutations of acoustic space in seven sites throughout Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum. Each installation creates a sonic dialogue with its acoustic and physical space. The striking forms of the trees and plants, as well as their relationship to the surrounding environments, provide a unique opportunity for the artistic and physical exploration of sound in space.” The project is not intended to displace the sounds of birds, wind, and other ambient music but to weave these ever-changing sounds into the space of her compositions.
Abby’s installation was completed as part of her dissertation project at the University of Washington. So she is not only bridging the old divide between nature and culture but the one between scholarship and creativity as well. In a recent interview with NPR Abby, discusses the project further and listeners can get a sense of what this is like to experience in person. Sensing some ties between her work and Cathy Fitzgerald’s, I’ll be contacting Abby in hopes that she may post some additional insights on this website.
Here’s a bit to whet your appetite for the new journal:
“With a serious commitment to collaboration across disparate fields but also within the field of
rhetoric and a heightened curiosity regarding para-academic interpretations of rhetoric, Itineration is especially interested in new work that explores the intersections of rhetoric, media, and culture through such approaches as speculative realism, phenomenology, feminist theory, mysticism, object-oriented ontology, agential realism, affect theory, materialism, posthumanism, biopolitics, bioethics, queer theory, psychoanalysis, assemblage theory, cosmopolitanism, vitalism, new media theory, hauntology, mythology, actor-network theory, panpsychism, media archaeology, paranormalism, biologism, and other developing systems of thought. Our belief, that life itself is expressive, discursive, and inherently rhetorical, is imbued with a resonance through the itinerate practice of investigative, affirmative movement. This road is open to all and we are all free to meet and collide with one another, forming strange friendships and meeting familiar strangers, all forged in itinerate travel.”
For more check the website: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Rhetoric, Media, and Culture
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society is excited to announce the launch of its blog, Seeing the Forest!
Check it out here:Â http://seeingtheforest.org/
This recent project announcement certainly pushed all kinds of buttons for me. As a diver, amateur marine biologist, and technophile, this kind of thing gives me the all-overs. And what a laudable goal: informing the public about the oceans by virtually taking them beneath the surface in ways that aren’t possible with traditional images or video.
Of course, a 360 degree high-res panorama isn’t being there. You’re not checking your air gauge or looking over your shoulder for sharks. It’s a still image, and one deliberately selected for its visual appeal – so we have Susan Davis’s Spectacular Nature all over again. Do we need to make Nature entertaining and photogenic–and invoke the technological deities–to get people to attend to natural systems? Apparently so, from the way this story is framed here and here.*
On the other hand, as many have pointed out, virtual tours can have a lower impact than actual ones (no big carbon-spewing jet flying me to the dive site, where I accidentally break coral formations), and they make distant places accessible to more people. Bruno Latour observes that science itself serves as both the cause of many of our problems and the tool by which we identify and solve some of them; virtual-reality seems destined to follow a similarly ambiguous path.
As I said when my sister-in-law posted this story to my Facebook wall, I can’t wait for the haptic feedback version — maybe on a recumbent treadmill where I could get some exercise by pretending to swim. Meanwhile, a somewhat more (phenomenologically) embodied form of virtual reef diving is available at places like the Divers Alert Network’s island in Second Life.
*The latter further frames this within a context of technology-as-business, completely mystifying the connection between commodification and environmental degradation.