The Moving Enviroments workshop is currently in session at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. You can follow some of the discussions and events at Adrian Ivakhiv’s Immanence blog. Thanks for posting and sharing, Adrian!
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
A picture is worth a thousand words – especially when it depicts the natural environment. Images have played a prominent role in environmental discussions for years; pictures, paintings, and photographs have often been used to influence public opinion and advance political discussion. While the impact of oil paintings on the perception of land during the eighteenth and nineteenth century has been investigated to a certain extent, this workshop aims to subject the role of twentieth century images in diverse national campaigns to critical consideration. Papers should examine the role of images in shaping environmental discourses by analyzing the effect of photographs, printed photograph collections, newspaper images, and magazines as well as exhibitions or graphics (posters and logos) on environmental debates.
The workshop will analyze the impact of “eco-images” by discussing the history of their perception and influence. Papers should establish the connection between visual formats and public environmental awareness; case studies on images, specifically those not extensively covered in academic literature or those that examine Asian, African, and South American contexts, are especially encouraged.
The workshop will engage with the following questions:
– How have visual strategies endorsed conservationist and/or environmental perceptions?
– How have eco-images helped environmental issues enter and influence political discussions?
– Is it possible to measure the pictorial influence on public opinion/political bodies/legislation?
– Which common global icons have been adopted by environmental campaigns?
– Can certain images be linked to specific national contexts?
– How have national perceptions of nature impacted visual rhetoric?
– How has the implementation of environmental images changed during the twentieth century?
Detailed abstracts (600-800 words) for papers and a short CV should be submitted by email no later than October 15, 2011 to arielle.helmick@lmu.de and giselaparak@gmx.com.
Applications and papers must be written in English. Successful participants will be notified by November 15, 2011. Â Discussions at the workshop will be based on pre-circulated papers (about 10 pages) which will be due on February 15, 2012. The best essays will be considered for publication in the Rachel Carson Center’s Perspectives series. Travel and accommodation costs will be reimbursed by the organizers.
For further information on organizational issues please contact:
Julia Staudinger at julia.staudinger@carsoncenter.lmu.de
The Rachel Carson Center is a joint initiative of LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum and is generously supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research.
Click link for more information…
http://discourseanalysis.net/wiki.php?wiki=en%3A%3AEvents&id=572
CFP: Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) 2012
Boston, MA
21-25 March, 2012
<http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=conference>
Panel Title: Eco_Cinema: Objects, Objectives, Objections
Co-Chairs: Andrew Hageman & Salma Monani
Ecocinema studies is going through the propositions, explorations, and revisions of an emerging area of research. “Ecocinema†as the identifying term has itself not yet been codified as a singular signification. This panel seeks to explore this open space and time through papers that push, drag, and/or bend our existing understanding of ecocinema and its modes of critical analysis. In doing so, the panel aims to foster discussion of how cinema form interacts with ecology and ecocritical analysis. We welcome a broad range of historical, critical, and theoretical approaches to this exploration.
Papers might, as the panel subtitle indicates, focus on one or a combination of fundamental matters.
Object-oriented papers might consider what sorts of objects ecocinema studies investigates and what sorts of methodological apparatuses to use. These concerns range from film genres (documentary, fiction feature, Hollywood, Indie, national, regional, SF, transmedia…) to quantitative and qualitative reception assessment to debates over affect theory or psychoanalytical film critique.
Objective-oriented papers might consider which aims this field seems to be taking and/or should consider revising or adopting. These concerns range from the potential for collaboration with filmmakers to debates over ideological and/or prescriptive critique.
Objections-oriented papers might consider the challenges ecocinema and ecocinema studies needs to confront, urgently or otherwise, and which the field can productively benefit from addressing.
Clearly the objects, objectives, and objections cut across each other, and we encourage your paper to do so as well.
To propose a paper, please send your 150-250 word abstract to both Andrew Hageman <andrewhageman@gmail.com> and Salma Monani <smonani@gettysburg.edu> before August 10, 2011. We will notify you promptly as the SCMS panel proposal deadline is September 1st.
3-D Printers Create Real Objects Out Of Computer Images
Here & Now Guest:
- Rajeev Kulkarni, vice president of global engineering at 3-D Systems
For the past 20 years, high tech companies have been using 3-D printers to create parts and prototypes. These devices cost millions of dollars, and could convert computer-generated images into real-life objects. Now, a less-sophisticated home 3-D printer it out, starting at $1,300.
The printers spew out plastic, layer upon layer, to create objects from the ground up. People can use the devices to create toys, spare parts, even plastic jewelry for their kids. But what are the practical uses of the product?
Rajeev Kulkarni, vice president of global engineering at 3-D Systems in Charlotte, N.C., told Here & Now’s Robin Young that the 3-D home printing industry is in its infancy, but has immense potential.
He said that one day, people could use the printer to create replacement parts, instead of going to the store.
“Something breaks in your washing machine,†he said, “and you download the digital data and you print the part yourself.â€
Kulkarni says that while the home 3-D printers on the market right now make things out of plastic, he can envision a day when people can even cook with these gizmos.
“Think about you having your kid’s birthday party, and each chocolate piece is customized to… the kid attending the party. It’s their own personal chocolate bar with their face on it!†Kilkarni said.
Call for Self-Nominations
Editor, Cinema Journal
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) seeks a new Editor and a new institutional home for its scholarly publication, Cinema Journal. Application deadline: September 30, 2011.
Background and History
Published by the SCMS since 1959, Cinema Journal is the second oldest scholarly publication devoted to the study of film and media studies in the United States.
Cinema Journal is published quarterly by the University of Texas Press. Members of the Society receive the journal as one of the benefits of membership. Cinema Journal is open to all areas of humanities-oriented scholarship in media studies. It welcomes submissions on film, television, radio, sound, and digital media. Considered one of the top journals in media studies, the acceptance rate is about 15 percent.
In addition to featuring in-depth engaging essays, Cinema Journal also includes:
• In Focus – a special thematic section of short essays published in each issue of Cinema Journal. The feature is compiled by a guest editor selected by the editor of Cinema Journal.
• Book Reviews – Reviews are featured in each issue of Cinema Journal and are generally matched thematically with the In Focus feature.
• Archival News – This online feature reports recent news highlights from the media archive community, including: acquisitions, preservation, institutional and organizational changes, exhibitions, awards, new DVD releases, online resources, and technology.
• Professional Notes -This online feature lists recent books published in media studies, as well as articles on film and TV published in non-media journals.
SCMS represents the interests of scholars in cinema and media studies through an international constituency that numbers over 2500 members. The organization is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Description and Policies of Cinema Journal
All essays submitted to Cinema Journal are blind refereed. In addition to scholarly essays, Cinema Journal publishes a section of thematically connected, short solicited essays as part of its In Focus section, Professional Notes, an Archival News column, essays on teaching, and an annual directory of SCMS members.
General Position Description
The Editor of Cinema Journal is primarily responsible for processing submissions, procuring readers, and corresponding with authors. The Editor also copyedits all manuscripts before submission to the University of Texas Press and insures that Cinema Journal’s various sections are submitted in a timely and professional manner. He or she also procures guest editors for the In Focus feature and assigns authors to write shorter features such as conference reports. The Editor is assisted by an Associate Editor, a Book Review Editor, and an editorial board. In addition, the Editor is expected to receive support from his/her home institution.
Editor’s Term and Obligations
The Cinema Journal Editor is selected by the SCMS Board of Directors. The Editor serves a five-year term, which may be renewed. The Editor is responsible for selecting an editorial board, whose members also serve a five-year term, subject to the approval of the SCMS Board of Directors.
The Editor serves as ex officio member of the SCMS Board of Directors. He/she attends all Board meetings (ordinarily twice each year) and reports to the Board on issues concerning Cinema Journal at these times. As part of the application process, the Editor submits a statement of interest, outline of his/her qualifications, and vision for the journal to the Board for its approval. Apart from approving the policy and the Editor’s proposed editorial board, the Board has no jurisdiction over the conduct of Cinema Journal.
Role of the Host Institution
The institution that houses Cinema Journal must supply the Editor with suitable office space, a computer, postage, fax services, office supplies, photocopying, an email account, and a long-distance telephone line. A part-time graduate student assistant should be assigned to help with proofreading, manuscript processing, correspondence, inquiries, clerical duties, and other miscellaneous chores. The Editor may also procure assistance from interns. The Editor must also be granted some course release time by his/her home institution.
The host institution supports the Editor’s travel expenses to the annual SCMS conference each spring so that he or she may attend the Board of Directors’ meeting that is held at that time. The expenses incurred by the Editor in connection with the Board’s fall meeting are covered by SCMS.
Benefits
Association with Cinema Journal enhances an institution’s visibility and prestige in the field of cinema and media studies. It offers the Editor an unparalleled familiarity with major issues of scholarly and disciplinary concern, as well as providing him or her with an in-depth knowledge of cutting-edge research. It also provides graduate student assistants and other students associated with the activities of the Editor a unique professional experience and an understanding of scholarly standards and conventions in cinema and media studies.
Timeline
The SCMS Board of Directors will ideally make its selection of a new Editor by January 1, 2012. The new Editor will not assume his/her role until one full year later, on January 1, 2013. This one year period between selection and appointment will allow for a smooth transition between the current and the new Editor. It will also ensure that the new Editor is fully conversant with his/her responsibilities and with the work flow of the journal itself (since In Focus and book reviews are assigned a year in advance of their publication).
Please submit your statement of interest to the Board of Directors as well as a summary of your qualifications and a statement of your vision for the journal by September 30, 2011 to:
The SCMS Board of Directors
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
University of Oklahoma
640 Parrington Oval
Wallace Old Science Hall, Room 300
Norman, OK 73019
E-Mail: office@cmstudies.org
ASLE was a busy conference at which woefully due to other duties such as chairing and responding, I was unable to attend many of the ecomedia panels. While I outline my reflections on some of the panels that I attended, Jennifer Ladino has also promised to share her conference thoughts. And I hope Andrew Hageman will provide comments on his Skype experience.
Despite losing some participants at the last minute as well as our co-leader Sid Dobrin, the preconference seminar focused on ecocinema studies proved productive and stimulating. Five major themes occupied its participants, and discussion ranged from tackling definitions such as “what is ecocinema?†and “what is its methodology?†to “realism and documentary modes†and questions such as “how can we approach cinema’s affective capacities?†and “how does one begin to utilize its ecopedagogical potentials?†While I’ve be briefly summarizing our discussion on the first two topics on the seminar’s blog, Alexa von Weik, who was a participant at our workshop, will be leading a workshop at Munich’s Rachel Carson Center for the Environment dedicated primarily to the notion of ecocinematic affect. All in all, the seminar was energizing, reminding us all of the evolving and exciting directions in which ecocinema studies is headed.
I also attended an 8:30 am session chaired by David Ingram and titled Being Animal: Ecocriticism and Film, which I found especially engaging given its two papers on Being Caribou, a film I have analyzed in a paper forthcoming in ISLE. Both papers on Being Caribou seemed to complement to my own, which examines the film’s text primarily through the lens of just sustainability. Ryan Fitzpatrick’s paper was an examination of Heuer’s book Being Caribou, which documents the same journey, and Shirley Roburn’s paper involved a reception studies approach to the film. Fitzpatrick’s interest in understanding ecological space framed an argument that Heuer’s maps serve as ways of blurring boundaries of nation as well as those between wild and human. Fitzpatrick employed Deleuze and Gauttari’s notions of stratified and smooth space as a nice theoretical grounding for this analysis. Roburn, who had worked with an environmental NGO in the Yukon at the time of Heuer and Allison’s trip, demonstrates in her paper a clearly logical next step for eco-film critics. That is, the need for more attention to reception studies. Her work is informed by scholars interested in literary reception studies (e.g., Janice Radway) as well as those in film studies (e.g., Constance Balides).
Presenting in the same panel, Chip Oscarson from Brigham Young University further developed a topic he had begun to explore at the 2009 ASLE preconference Ecological Media seminar. His discussion of two avant-garde documentaries by Swedish director, Martin Kristersson, The Kestrel’s Eye (1998) and Light Years (2008) provided a persuasive argument for cinema as attempting biocentrism in its focus on how the films shy away from musical soundtracks and narrative voiceovers in favor of diagetic sound and specific POV angles.
I was also invited to chair a panel titled New Images of the Planetary Environment, which focused not on cinema but on other types of media. Sibylle Machat’s work examines news articles, op-eds, cartoons and other print news media coverage from 1970 to examine the way the Apollo 13 accident is evoked in Earth Day rhetoric. Pat Hackbarth employs GIS to help visualize ecological changes in the literary landscapes described by famous authors such as Mark Twain, Isak Denison, and M. Scott Momaday. This creative work can be found at her website Scene Changes: The Unmaking of Place, and in my own mind raised thoughts on the capacity of digital media to represent scientifically grounded narratives of risk as her focus is on visually highlighting the physical, quantitatively measurable changes in landscapes from the time of an author’s writings to more recently. Hackbarth highlights the capacity of humans to play a role in ecological damage and sees her work as an activist tool both for caution and hope. Mary Wilkins-Jordan, a librarian at Simmons College, discussed Earthcaching as a productive way to employ digital technology in learning about nature. Each of these talks fueled thoughtful questions from the audience. For example, Sarah Wald asked about whether Machat had considered a gendered/feminist critique of space rhetoric, especially when such rhetoric evokes the notion of “Mother Earth;†Lewis Ulman inquired about Hackbarth extending her visualization from iconic literary landscapes to others that might not be as iconic but along with these landscapes can demonstrate expanded scales of ecological change; and Nina Leone was curious to know if Wilkins-Jordan had examples of Earthcaching that suggested more nuanced understandings of nature, i.e., not primarily as geologically or aesthetically unique sites for recreation but perhaps as sites of environmental justice struggle. In each case, the questions pressed on the critic’s role in engaging with the alluring aspects of “new†technologies, and rounded out the session well.
While these sessions were clearly ecomedia oriented, others I attended also engaged the concerns of ecomedia scholars. For example, I attended two panels classified in the “Ecocriticism and Theory†stream, Anthologizing Ecocriticism and Theorizing Ecocriticism: Promises and Hopes. While neither takes as its explicit foci ecomedia both highlight that literary ecocritics see visuals and non-print media as part and parcel of the texts they study and interact with. For example, in the Anthologizing Ecocriticism panel, Katrina Dodson shared her introduction to the special issue of Qui Parle (19.2, 2011), “At the Intersections of Ecocriticism.†This anthology houses Alenda Chang’s “Games as Environmental Texts,†which explores video games. Its other essays also reference ecomedia (e.g., Stephanie LeMenager’s “Petro-Melacholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Griefâ€). Cheryl Glofelty’s comment that she located 104 anthologies with ecocriticism in their title reminded me that Paula Willoquet-Marcondi’s Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (2010) is perhaps the first anthology to overtly bring film and ecocriticism together.
Theorizing Ecocriticism: Promises and Hopes demonstrated ecomedia’s role in more overtly stylistic ways. In particular, I was struck by the use of animated images that all the speakers used to communicate their thoughts on their Powerpoints. For example, the persistent ripple movements Opperman’s frame, or the flipping pages in Estok’s background seemed strategically placed to reiterate the way new theories of ecocriticism reframe inanimate objects as animated subjects with material agency. Here the emphasis on stylistic choice served to reinforce my sense of how all the papers, (but especially Serenella Iovino’s “Material Ecocriticismâ€) are clearly discussing theories of keen interest to ecomedia scholars’ engagement with ecomedia’s materialities.
Finally, a note to recognize the ecomedia content of the plenaries: Una Chaudhari’s analysis of Marina Zarkuw’s Mesocosm and Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo as texts that can be analyzed at the intersections of performance studies and animal studies provides exciting understandings of such media’s ecocritical potentials, and Subhankar Banerjee’s photographs and web presence (at ClimateStoryTellers.org) demonstrate the continued deployment of ecomedia in activist endeavors.
In all, I found ASLE’s sessions and plenaries embracing ecomedia in ways that will continue to fuel not only its study but also the relevance of sites such as this one and all those listed in our blogroll. Ecocritical attention to how visual and non-print media help and hinder the ways in which humans interface with the more-than-human world is vibrant and alive.
This summer I am teaching a 4-week 400-level Women’s and Gender Studies Course titled ‘Taming the Beast: Nature, Gender, and 
Technology in Hollywood Cinema’. Here is a description.
This course examines representations nature, gender, and technology in popular Hollywood cinema and introduces students to the the theoretical, historical, and aesthetic applications of ecofeminist media studies. Ecocriticism and feminist media studies share particular interest in questions about the ways which audio-visual media have simultaneously constructed and deconstructed patriarchy’s historical domination over women and the environment. To consider how “gender†and “nature†operate as social constructs in cinematic texts we begin with key readings in the developing field of ecofeminist media studies and delves into the insights of Donna Haraway, who has heavily influenced scholarship science, media, and ecotheory.
Week 1: Taming the Beast: Toward an Ecofeminist Film Studies
M Screen: King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933)
T Discuss: Kenneth Bernard, Cynthia Erb, and Paul Wells on King Kong
W Screen: Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)
Th Discuss: Laura Mulvey, “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure†and “Afterthoughts on
Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure†& Annette Kolodny, from Lay of the Land
Week 2: Cyborg Ecology
M Screen: Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973)
T Discuss: Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto†Stacey Alaimo, “Cyborg and Ecofeminismâ€
W Screen: Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Th Discuss: Pat Brereton, from Hollywood Utopia
Week 3: Crossing Borders
M Screen: Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
T Discuss: Pat Brereton, from Hollywood Utopia and Time magazine “Gender Benderâ€
W Screen: Gorillas in the Mist (Michael Apted, 1988), Critical Essay Due
Th Discuss: Fossey, from Gorillas in the Mist & Haraway, from Primate Visions
Week 4: Companion Species
M Screen: The Secret Life of Bees (Gina Prince Bythewood, 2008)
T Discuss: Vandana Shiva, from Staying Alive & Schacker, from A Spring Without Bees
W Screen: Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000)
& Discuss: Haraway, “From Cyborgs to Companion Speciesâ€
Th In-Class Final Exam: Bring a “green book†and pencil. Annotated Bibliography Due.
Has anyone designed and/or run reception studies on audiences of eco films? I have in mind pre-screening questionnaires, post-screening questionnaires for some quantitative analysis as well as focus groups pre and post for qualitative. I’m involved in a small film fest this year and running a campus screening series and plan to do a study so we don’t all just show up, enjoy our popcorn, watch eco crises, then head home.
Resources or experiences much appreciated.
Thanks.