I will be making parts of my “Advanced Environmental Humanities” course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I’d like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community.
The course is a graduate and upper level undergraduate seminar premised on the understanding that the current “global moment” is deeply challenging, confusing, and dispiriting, but at the same time potentially “pregnant with possibility,” and that the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities has much to offer it. The class will be meeting online using MS Teams software on Thursdays, beginning February 4 and running until May 6, 1:15-4:15 pm Eastern (New York City) time.
Here is a brief description. Anyone interested in joining the class for some of the readings and discussions can write me about it. If we’re lucky, we may occasionally get an author or two to join us.
Continue Reading »Posted in Academe, Eco-theory | Tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Advanced Environmental Humanities, courses, EcoCultureLab, environmental humanities, readings, University of Vermont | Leave a Comment »
What better way to understand ecological perception than by applying it to a study of the music of Radiohead, right?
Okay, I’ll explain. “Ecological perception” is not what you might think. (And it isn’t what I, in my writing, call “perceptual ecology.“) It is a psychological theory that studies the perception of an organism (such as a human) in terms of how it responds to the perceived “affordances” presented by that organism’s environment. Perception takes place not in the head or the brain, but in the (nervous system mediated) correspondence between organism and environment. Based in James J. Gibson’s studies of visual perception and applied to music by Eric Clarke, Alan Moore, and others, ecological perception in music looks for commonalities and differences in people’s interpretation of music and traces these to cross-cultural invariants and cultural variations and “specifications” in how listeners respond to musical affordances.
What does all of this have to do with ecology? And with Radiohead? For the most part, it doesn’t have much to do with the first, at least as ecology is commonly conceived, but I want to point out how it does or how it can. As for Radiohead, they are as good an example of “process-relationally interesting” music as any. (One of their albums made my “top 10 albums” list a few years ago, though really it’s their later work that cashes out on the promise of that album.)
The main reason to connect the two, however, is because that’s what Brad Osborn does in his book Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead (Oxford University Press, 2017). What I want to do here is to extend his argument to the sort of thing I mean when I talk about perceptual ecology.
Continue Reading »Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Music & soundscape | Tagged Brad Osborn, Britney Spears, Daydreaming, ecological psychology, ecology of perception, ecomusicology, J. J. Gibson, James J. Gibson, music psychology, music theory, musicology, perceptual ecology, process-relational thought, Radiohead, Stockhausen, The Pyramid Song, Thom Yorke | 2 Comments »
There’s a fairly straightforward narrative about media and cultural hegemony in the United States that most scholarly observers have come to largely agree on (with the usual spectrum of variations in emphasis), but that more of the public ought to be aware of. It accounts for how we got here, into this situation where media is recognized to be a key causal factor shaping the deep polarization of a country experiencing a state of civil crisis — not quite civil war (yet), but something that has edged perilously close to it.
The narrative runs something like this.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics | Tagged cultural hegemony, culture wars, Fairness Doctrine, George Lakoff, illiberalism, media ecologies, media ecology, media hegemony, media regimes, political polarization, Trumpism, Walter Cronkite | Leave a Comment »
Two points of social media use call for more attention as we make sense of this week’s events at the U. S. Capitol.
1) Videos and selfies from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rallies are circulating online and making it easier to identify those who participated in the attempted coup at the Capitol. Images created and shared voluntarily and eagerly are used against those who create and share them. This is part of what I will call the voluntary mass self-surveillance of society enabled by social media.
2) Donald Trump’s permanent removal from Twitter felt, to many, like a more significant act than his potential second impeachment. Certainly to him, with his 88 million Twitter followers, it was more significant; he was, after all, as much a product of Twitter as it has been a product of him. To top it off, his temporary suspension from Facebook and Instagram, Google’s and Apple’s announcements limiting the alternative, conservative dominated Parler platform, and discussions among his followers about where to go, both to follow Trump and to organize further actions, have been among the biggest news of the last 24 hours. This relates more generally to the social mediatization of politics.
While these two trends are being considered critically by media and cultural theorists, there is a socio-ecological, or ecocultural, or even ecotopian dimension I’d like to add to that critique here.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics | Tagged bioregionalism, Capitol insurrection, cell phones, ecocriticism, ecocultural theory, ecopolitics, ecotopia, ecotopian criticism, Googlization, media ecologies, media ecology, media politics, QAnization, surveillance, surveillance capitalism, Trumpism, twitter, voluntary mass self-surveillance | Leave a Comment »
I am an academic who researches, writes, and teaches about the human relationship with the ecological environment within which we live and on which we depend. I recognize that that relationship is deeply troubled, and I want to be working on untroubling it.
Politics — the shaping and implementation of policy to steer collective and institutional action — is one of the ways, and an essential way, to do that. (Others include the arts, the sciences, technological innovation, and philosophy/spirituality.) But politics is complicated and nowadays gets in the way of that “untroubling” more often than it facilitates it.
Yesterday’s Trumpist insurrection at the U. S. Capitol is perhaps symbolic of how politics has “gotten in the way.” But nothing that happened yesterday surprised me.
Continue Reading »Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics | Tagged 01-06-21, Capitol, climate denialism, disinformation, far right, fascism, hope, image war, information war, insurrection, January 6 2021, meme magic, QAnon, right-wing media, Trump, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome, Trumpism, Trumplan, U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. | Leave a Comment »
I’m working on a lengthyish post about conspiracy theory (specifically, QAnon) and the “post-truth condition,” but in the meantime I want to post a few tidbits from something I’ve been enjoying reading related to that topic. A Reddit conversation with QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino includes some smart observations about QAnon, but also useful insights into the life of a young, underemployed scholar that are worth sharing (grad students, take note!).
Continue Reading »Posted in Academe, Media ecology | Tagged "Do your own research", Marc-André Argentino, QAnon, research | Leave a Comment »
How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.
Continue Reading »Posted in Eco-theory | Tagged Anna Tsing, Anthropocene, books, books of the decade, cosmopolitics, decolonial turn, decoloniality, Donna Haraway, ecocultural theory, Eduardo Kohn, extinction crisis, Marison de la Cadena, multispecies studies, ontological turn | 6 Comments »
Harold Budd’s passing yesterday (from coronavirus complications) has inspired me to create a multichannel chamber of his music, which you can enter into and wander around in by clicking on the tabs below. Try them all at once, or mix channels at your leisure.
His music, perhaps more than anyone’s, lends itself to this kind of multi-mirrored, kaleidoscopic simultaneity. If I could set up 32 speakers around a large hall to play 16 different pieces of his at the same time (rather like John Cage did with his Roaratorio, or Yannis Xenakis with his cavernous electronic compositions), I would. The result, in Budd’s case, would be a kind of soft, velvet-textured, yet massive kaleidoscope of ambient spaciousness. A soundscape suitable for a long wander, which is how I imagine his current (postpartum) voyage to be. RIP.
Click on the links below at your mixing-board leisure.
Continue Reading »Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged ambient music, Brian Eno, contemporary music, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie, soundscape | 2 Comments »
