M+E+ (the official blog of Media+Environment)
NEW – Metabolic Riffs podcast series
In the face of ecological devastation globally, and the rise of the authoritarianism that often catalyses ecological collapse, Metabolic Riffs, a podcast series, attempts to both unearth and reanimate the Earth that we inhabit. Our conversations engage with the environmental humanities, media and mediation, and public policy and politics. These interviews center around a speaker, their body of work, and concerns they might have to offer to the humanities largely. We go beyond the conventional rubric of academic scholarship and speak to activists, artists and campaigners alike, and engage in their critical practice around environmental justice, decolonial thinking, and community engagement. Metabolic Riffs is supported by the University of California Press’ Media + Environment journal and the Carsey-Wolf Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Episode 1: The Ocean Humanities and Wild Blue Media with Melody Jue
Melody Jue is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A diver by interest, her latest book, Wild Blue Media (Duke University Press, 2020), submerges its readers into the ocean, asking us how might being in the deep water produce a shift from our habitual land-based subjectivities. It is here that the ocean itself emerges as a media environment, a place where light and dark, weight and pressure of the seawater, transforms how environments and information are created, transmitted and perceived. In this episode, we ask her about Wild Blue Media, her forthcoming book, Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Co-edited with Rafico Ruiz, Duke University Press), questions of mediations and metaphors, pre-activism, and what might lay ahead of us in the Blue New Deal.
After the interview, we are joined by Maxximilian Seijo, PhD student at the program of Comparative Literature at UCSB, for a quick reflection on Melody’s work, her spring 2020 graduate seminar, “Metabolic Science Fiction,” and the concept of metabolism broadly.
Interview recorded on 28 October 2019. Published on 13 September 2020.
About the Metabolic Riffs Team
Metabolic Riffs is co-hosted by Richard Farrell and Pujita Guha, both second year Ph.D scholars at the Film and Media Department at UCSB. Richard Farrell completed his Masters at the University of South Florida prior to his time at UCSB, and works at the intersection of environmental media, heterodox political economy and documentary studies. Pujita Guha has completed her Masters and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and works at the intersection of environmental media, south and southeast asian studies, and contemporary media and art.
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Call for Reviewers
The new UC Press online, open access journal Media+Environment invites interested scholars to submit proposals for book and media reviews for possible inclusion on our journal’s official blog hosted by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
A preliminary list of mostly books is included below, but we are very open to other suggestions (such as films, games, and exhibitions) so long as there is a demonstrable connection to the journal’s defining intellectual nexus of media and environment. We anticipate a review length of 1,200 – 1,500 words. Submitted reviews will be evaluated for publication by the journal’s editors.
The deadline for this initial round of review submissions is March 16, 2020 but earlier submissions are welcome. If you are interested in serving as a reviewer or if you have any questions, please contact the journal’s Coordinating Editor Stephen Borunda (stephenborunda@ucsb.edu). Include the title of one (or more) of the books below and your mailing address in your email. Books will be assigned and mailed on a rolling basis.
Additionally, we welcome authors of relevant books to contact us so that we might add their titles to this ever-growing list.
- Appel, Hannah et al. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press
- Bisonnette, Sylvia. 2019. Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation: Becoming Animated. Boca Raton: CRC Press
- Booth, Graham et al. One Strange Rock (television series). National Geographic Network
- (*CLAIMED*) Chang, Alenda. 2019. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press
- Cubitt, Sean. 2016. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press
- Daggett, Cara. 2019. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press
- Fay, Jennifer. 2018. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press
- Gaard, Greta. 2017. Critical Ecofeminism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield
- Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2018. Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times. New York City: Punctum Books
- Kääpä, Pietari. 2018. Environmental Management of the Media: Policy, Industry, Practice. London/New York: Routledge
- Kaplan, E. Ann. 2016. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. North Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
- Maxwell, Richard et al. 2015. Media and the Ecological Crisis. London/New York: Routledge
- McCormack, Derek P. 2018. Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Elements). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press
- Monani, Salma and Joni Adamson. 2016. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. London/New York: Routledge
- Monani, Salma and Sean Cubitt, et al. 2012. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. London/New York: Routledge
- Pallant, Chris. 2015. Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function. London: Bloomsbury
- Parks, Lisa. 2018. Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror. London/New York: Routledge
- Randerson, Janine. 2018. Weather As Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
- Ray, Sarah J. April 2020. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (forthcoming). Berkeley, California: UC Press
- Ray, Sarah J. et al. 2017. Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
- Ray, Sarah J. and Kevin Maier, eds. Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
- Seymour, Nicole. 2015. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Champaign: University of Illinois Press
- Seymour, Nicole. 2018. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
- Schwoch, James. 2018. Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier. Champaign: University of Illinois Press
- Smaill, Belinda. 2016. Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image. New York: SUNY Press
- (*CLAIMED*) Starosielski, Nicole and Janet Walker. 2016. Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment. London/New York: Routledge
- Taylor, Sarah M. 2019. Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue. New York: NYU Press
- Tsing Anna Lowenhaupt et al. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Michigan
- Vaughan, Hunter. 2019. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret. New York City: Columbia University Press
- (*CLAIMED*) Wald, Sarah et al. 2019. Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press
- Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press
- Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press