Brian Leiter is sharing the results of a survey on his blog to see which academic publishers are considered “best” in his field of philosophy. I find surveys like this useful — at least when carried out somewhat scientifically and systematically (which Leiter’s isn’t and doesn’t claim to be) — and I think these particular results are not too different from what an equivalent survey in other humanities fields might find.
Posted in Academe | Tagged academic publishing, publishers | 2 Comments »
On e²mc we’re thinking through the various meanings of “media ecology.”
The first, chronologically, is the medium theory of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others — sometimes called the Toronto School of communication theory. Neil Postman’s “New York school” can be considered a more critical and pessimistic adjunct to this tradition.
As a second tradition I’ve lumped together Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics | Tagged Boyle, cultural environmentalism, culture jamming, Lessig, McLuhan, media ecology, mental environmentalism, Situationism | 1 Comment »
I’ll be giving the following talk next Wednesday, February 6, at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
It’s part of the series Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman? An Ecosophical Roadmap for Artists and Other Futurists.
(The series looks incredible. I wish I could be there for all the other talks and events.)
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
e2mc, short for “evolving ecological media cultures,” has gone online.
e2mc begins as the class blog for the University of Vermont course “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.” Its long-term goal is to become the online face of the UVM Ecomedia Studies Lab, which is still in development.
The blog is open to anyone interested in participating, provided that you share its goal of open and respectful discussion of issues related to the intersecting themes of media, ecology, culture, and politics.
The blog’s design is still in progress; at some point we intend to unveil a more interesting and interactive format. But for now, it looks like this.
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged e2mc, media ecology | 3 Comments »
A few days after Aaron Swartz’s suicide — in part triggered by the prospect of a 35-year prison sentence for making a big stash of scholarly journal articles available to the public for free (!) — it is appropriate to think about what is wrong with the state of academic publishing today.
Here’s a for instance: I got an email today about a new issue of the journal Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture. It’s a special issue on “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.” It looks great: 16 articles, totaling 170 pages, of theoretical writing, analysis, and conversations between artists, scholars, and activists from around the world. I’d love to read it and to recommend it to my students, who are studying the intersections between art, ecology, politics, and activism.
Posted in Academe | Tagged Aaron Swartz, academic publishing, open access | 3 Comments »
The Immanence Shadow Blog — that space where I scoop up little things of interest found on the internet — has been reinvented and reloaded as scoop.it/t/immanence. You can subscribe to it here.
The latest piece I’ve added is the following bit of prescient (or perhaps eternally relevant) American humor:
H/t to Jon Cogburn at APPS. And thanks to Antonio for the scoop on Scoop.it.
Posted in Blog stuff, Media ecology | 1 Comment »
The Wilfrid Laurier University Press page for Ecologies of the Moving Image is up, here. Their Spring catalogue, which can be downloaded here, includes two new books on Jean-Luc Godard (adding to an impressive back catalog of film titles), as well as Gary Genosko’s When Technocultures Collide, Kamboureli and Verduyn’s Critical Collaborations: Indigenity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, and other good titles.
The Environmental Humanities series continues to grow, with books on Sustaining the West and Avatar and Nature Spirituality. (I had to excuse myself from the latter, since my Avatar material was already appearing in two other books, though I had co-written the introduction to the journal issue from which this volume grew. The book is an impressive volume, which Bron Taylor poured a lot of hard work into.)
You can already pre-order EMI from Amazon, but Amazon.ca has it priced more reasonably. It won’t be out till May, and this web site will tell you about good deals as they arise. (It’s 435 pages, which accounts for the high price.)
I’ll be adding video clips to go with the book, either here or on a separate web page for the book.
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged Ecologies of the Moving Image | 3 Comments »
A new study in The Lancet has determined that mass privatization in former Communist Eastern Europe — what was once called “shock therapy,” but is more usefully considered a form of “shock neoliberalization” — resulted in an excess of about a million deaths in that part of the world.
A few quotes from the Oxford University summary:
Posted in Politics | Tagged Eastern Europe, neoliberalism | 1 Comment »
This continues the consideration of subjectivity begun in the last post (on Zizek and Buddhism). It also continues the series on process-relational ecosophy-G, or pre-G.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged pre-G, subjectivity, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
This started out as a response to Slavoj Zizek’s recent talk here at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, subjectivity, Zizek | 15 Comments »
As I prepare to teach a course in the spring called “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics,” I’m weighing out the benefits and risks of opening the course to an online audience.
This would involve sharing the syllabus online (though not the readings themselves, which would have to be purchased or “found” elsewhere) and moving some of our discussions to a public blog, as opposed to using the password-protected, registered-students-only Blackboard software (which many courses at this university now use).
It’s not an online course, and much of the class would still take place in a formal classroom setting. But my hope is that the public dimension could enrich class discussions both by allowing others (around the world) to participate to some extent, and by making our public conversation more accountable and potentially more meaningful. Seems to me that a commitment to open-access education calls for this sort of thing.
Posted in Academe | Tagged Academe | 3 Comments »
Bruno Latour’s upcoming Gifford Lectures sound remarkable. See ANTHEM for the details.
There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.
[. . .]
A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to explore in sufficient detail the scientific and political composition of the common world.
Perhaps the promise of Latour’s work — aside from its sociological and science-studies import — is reaching a new culmination as the religious and ecological threads he’s been toying with for so long come to their mutual fruition.
Thanks to Adam for the head’s-up.
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter | Tagged Gaia, natural religion | 5 Comments »
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