immanence

It’s been a few weeks since the last post on this blog, and will likely be another month before it starts up again in any serious way. This is because the fall semester has been wrapping up around me, with teaching, advising, and an overload of academic committee work building up to a rather deafening crescendo. And the first thing I will do once grades are in will be to take my first trip outside the U.S. or Canada since the pandemic began — a three-week family trip to Mexico (primarily Mexico City and Oaxaca, with a brief few days in the Yucatán).

The good news, looking forward, is that I will be on sabbatical starting in January, and will spend January through May in California, where I’ll take up a visiting scholar position at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center. The center is a leading research hub in the world of media studies, with a particular focus in “Global Media, Media and Democracy, Information Media, Media Industries, and Media and the Environment” (from their web site). They are also the primary institutional sponsor of Media+Environment, the journal I co-edit with Janet Walker and Alenda Chang (who are both based at UCSB), so the position will allow me to do some concentrated work with colleagues.

My main sabbatical activity will be to work on my in-progress book The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies in More-than-Human Worlds. Other work, including the Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, which I’m co-editing with a wonderful group of international colleagues, and another book tentatively titled Stormy Weather: Eco-Trauma, Global Media, and Navigation for the World-to-Come, will continue as time permits.

Once I am settled in Santa Barbara, I expect to get back into a rhythm of posting here at Immanence, perhaps with more of a focus on media-related topics, but with the usual mix of environment, philosophy, and all the rest. In the meantime, I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season.

I couldn’t decide on a video to share… Led Zep’s “Going to California”? Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Heading West“? Cyndi Lauper’s (way better) “Heading West“? Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West“? Some settler-colonial Americana? So I settled on a screen shot from The Motorcycle Diaries.