March 23, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The Media and Environment Scholarly Interest Group just won the prize for best attended business meeting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Or so we were informed by the SCMS interest group liaison present at the meeting.
This year’s SCMS featured what to my mind was by far the largest assemblage of panels and papers on all manner of environmental/ecological themes: analyses of filmic representations of nature, disasters and catastrophes, animals and nonhumans; theoretical excursions in ecocinema, eco-aesthetics, toxic and “energetic” media, frontier and extraction imaginaries, and more; and eco-materialist analyses of production processes, data backup systems, and other things. Some of these were sponsored by the M & E interest group; many were not.
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Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Uncategorized | Tagged film, media | 1 Comment »
March 13, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Emil plunges us further into the inhuman nature of tsunamis, earthquakes, ethics, and modern subjectivity, over at A(S)CENE.
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy | Tagged Anthropocene, Nigel Clark | Leave a Comment »
March 8, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Or, process-relational ecocriticism 2.0
Two of the courses I’m currently teaching — the intermediate-level “Environmental Literature, Art, and Media” and the senior-level “The Culture of Nature” — require introducing an eco-critical framework appropriate to a wide range of artistic forms, from literature to visual art, music, film and new media.
The process-relational framework developed in Ecologies of the Moving Image is synthetic and holistic in its scope, but it is too advanced for introducing in itself — accompanied by the philosophical underpinnings it requires — in these undergraduate classes. So I’ve been forced to rethink its categories to make them both more accessible and more broadly applicable.
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Posted in Eco-theory | Tagged ecocriticism, Ecologies of the Moving Image, epistemology, Guattari, music, Ontology, Peirce, three ecologies, visual art | 10 Comments »
February 23, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
UKR-TAZ announces a new mission:
The concept of the TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone, comes from “ontological anarchist” writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson). It is intended to indicate a space of liberation, a space which is at once physical and real, if temporary, and metaphysical — a space of consciousness outside of the mental frames of social structure, from which a reimagination of the world may proceed.
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Posted in Politics | Tagged Maidan, TAZ, Ukraine | 2 Comments »
February 23, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
For all the complaints many of us in the U.S. heard or voiced about the cold, this past January was the fourth warmest on record, and the 38th consecutive January and 347th consecutive month (almost 29 years) that global temperatures have been above the average for the 20th century.
More here and here.
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged weather | 1 Comment »
February 22, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
“Power to the millions, not to the millionaires” (#Leftmaidan)
Three forms of democracy vie with each other in Ukraine today.
The first of these is what we might call authoritarian democracy. This is a hybrid of democracy and authoritarian rule, in which partially developed democratic institutions can be relatively easily played off against each other by the powers-that-be to maintain their rule.
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Posted in Politics | Tagged anarchism, direct democracy, Politics, revolution, Ukraine | 3 Comments »
February 21, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Just as environmental media have a penchant for the spectacle of “disaster porn,” so does political media reveal a strong attraction to what Politico’s Sarah Kendzior, in “The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine,” calls the “apocalypstickle.”
An ugly word for political observers’ weird fascination with apocalyptic imagery. Brueghel, Bosch . . . and heightened internet traffic.
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Posted in Politics, Visual culture | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
“COUNTRY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” (from Ukrainian anarchist group Blackmaidan)
“It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside world has stopped working; as if we have been confronted momentarily with the formless grey emptiness of the screen itself…” (Slavoj Zizek, describing the scene outside a traveling couple’s window in Robert Heinlein’s “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”)
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Posted in Politics | Tagged activism, post-Soviet, provocation, revolution, Russia, Ukraine | 14 Comments »
February 6, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Starting a discussion on these topics here.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
February 3, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Since I was traveling at the time, I failed to note an interesting story that got covered in the science press about the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement.
As reported in articles in Scientific American, The Guardian, and elsewhere, a recent peer-reviewed study published in Climatic Science by sociologist Robert Brulle supports many claims that have been made by environmental scientists and activists documenting the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement — a close to $1 billion a year machine of nearly 100 organizations.
Most revealingly (or rather, obscuringly), denialism has been able to cloak its funding sources behind what have effectively become “money laundering” operations like Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, Science & society | Tagged climate denialism, global warming | 1 Comment »
February 1, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Over at A(S)CENE, we are starting to read Nigel Clark’s Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet as well as the Punctum Books open-access collection Making the Geological Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life.
Clark’s book has attracted some very intrigued — and a few rather ecstatic — reviews from geographers and social theorists, including a book review symposium in Progress in Human Geography. Back cover blurbers Barry Smart, Myra Hird, and Adrian Franklin call it “magnificent” and “compelling” (Smart), a “watershed for social theory” (Hird), and “possibly one of the most important books you are ever likely to read, Continue Reading »
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
January 29, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Not that readers of this blog need to be reminded of this, but some of our friends might (if you have friends like Donald Trump)…
Generalizing about global climate change from a cold snap is like predicting who will win the world series based on a single ball or strike in pre-season. The two things are about the same thing — temperature, baseball — but there’s little real connection between them beyond that.
This Washington Post article from the last U.S. “polar vortex” is helpful in putting things into perspective.
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Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged climate denialism, Donald Trump, global warming, weather | Leave a Comment »
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