I’m happy to share the news that both The New Lives of Images and Terra Invicta are now available for pre-order. The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds is a theoretically and empirically rich study of images, imagination, and the digital. It’s the fourth in a tetralogy of books on the ecology of imagination, and in many ways a direct follow-up to Ecologies of the Moving Image. Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth is an anthology that comes out of my Fulbright (Germany/Ukraine) work with 30+ Ukrainian scholars and artists. The book presents scholarly and creative writing (and visual art) embodying visions of what Ukrainians have been fighting for, within a global horizon of responses to the ecological crisis. More detailed descriptions are below.
The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, by Adrian J. Ivakhiv. Stanford University Press, September 2025, 408 Pages. Pre-order here.
In this ambitious new work, eco-philosopher and cultural theorist Adrian Ivakhiv presents an incisive new way of thinking about images and imagination. Drawing upon an immense range of materials, Ivakhiv reassesses the place of imagination in cultural life, analyzing how people have interacted with images in the past and the ways that digital media are profoundly altering these relationships today. The book contributes powerfully to the study of visual culture and digital media, and provides provocative interpretations of a range of important artists and media movements: from the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, the ambitious multi-screen installations of John Akomfrah, the abstract art of Swedish spiritualist Hilma af Klint, and the Afrofuturism of jazz musicians like Sun Ra and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to the ever-expanding universe of animal videos on YouTube. Along the way, the book delves into animacy and religious imagery, iconophilia and iconoclasm, divination and prophecy, “truthiness” and “enchantment networks,” online communities and artificial intelligence, the political and affective economies of digital media, and the role of utopian futurism in the present “climate-colonial Anthropocene” predicament. The result is a vital contribution toward a more empowering conception of the creative imagination and its possibilities in today’s emerging digital ecology.
Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, edited by Adrian Ivakhiv. McGill-Queen’s University Press, November 2025, 384 Pages, 44 photos, 1 diagram, colour throughout. 15.9 x 23.5 cm. Pre-order here.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced not only military and humanitarian responses but also scholarly and artistic ones from Ukrainians looking to the future of their country.
Terra Invicta is a series of critical and creative articulations of pasts, presents, and possible futures involving humans and the more-than-human world. The authors suggest that Ukraine is caught in an environmental war, waged by a fossil-fuel superpower against people who are prepared to lay down their lives to protect their land. This volume explores the relationship between Ukrainians – a multiethnic and multireligious people with a complicated history – and the Ukrainian land, the zemlia to which they belong. Themes include decoloniality, ecocultural identity, the politics of reconstruction, and artistic responsibility amid a war for national survival. Contributors emphasize the value of reviving multispecies relations with the land, positively transforming multicultural relations with history, and reinvigorating grassroots engagements with the state and society.
Terra Invicta grapples with the role of artistic expression in the face of war and collective loss and what it means to commit to a place, a land, a territory, in a world set in constant motion.
Andrey Kurkov (leading Ukrainian novelist and essayist) writes, “The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand today’s Ukraine and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.”