Spotlight: Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group

Spotlight:Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group Patricia Ciccone and Jennifer Lynn Peterson, SIG Co-chairs The Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) had its first meeting in 2014 in Seattle, where scholars from various subfields were invited by Hunter Vaughan and Janet Walker to share their research over drinks. This first informal meeting led to a more established gathering the following year in Montreal, along with an off-site screening of environmentally themed experimental films in a local venue, in collaboration with the Experimental Film and Media SIG. From the beginning, the Media and the Environment SIG was conceived with an interdisciplinary vision. It was always meant to connect scholars working on a broad variety of topics, from environmental policies and how they affect our daily lives to the ways the climate is represented on-screen, or from the ecological impacts of our media consumption to questions of environmental justice that center decolonial, feminist, and queer approaches. Yet many of the tenets of what we might consider classical film studies are still relevant to our subfield. Our members examine the production, distribution, and reception practices of cinema and media from an environmental perspective. What does it mean for big production industries such as Hollywood or Bollywood to "go green"? What are the hidden environmental costs of the very technologies we study, such as film stocks or cell phones? [End Page 1] How much water is wasted on cooling down the mega-computers used for streaming? All these questions add to the existing corpus of cinema and media studies. Of course, we also have our own language and sets of concerns that broaden the scope of the field. In recent years, scholars have been studying the environment as a mediating agent itself: from the material and conceptual qualities of the environmental to the socio-political discourses that surround oil spills, forest fires, or floods. Over the last decade, an impressive amount of interdisciplinary work on media and the environment has been published, but the subfield is still emerging. Indeed, the environmental framework issues a challenge to the humanities writ large, one that has not yet been fully realized. When we re-examine the history of human-produced media from a perspective that is also attuned to the history of the planet, when we interrogate the relationship between humans and the more-than-human realm of life, when we produce cinema and media scholarship that aims to blur the very line between culture and nature, there is a risk. After all, when you look at it closely, there is hardly any media studies topic that lacks an environmental angle. The risk of doing environmental media studies may appear to some like we are ceding hard-won disciplinary boundaries, straying into interdisciplinary generalization as we take on topics ranging across science, technology, infrastructure, capitalism, the digital, the material, or even the periodic table. But for the members of our SIG, the risk is worth it, for when we do this kind of work well, with scholarly rigor and exacting analysis, we open up the potential to bring crucial new intellectual, ethical, and conceptual perspectives to cinema and media studies and to the humanities more broadly. In sum, scholarship on media and the environment synthesizes a variety of approaches to committed scholarship in the service of our precarious future and its challenges. Our SIG aims to nurture new work from both emerging and established scholars that will help expand the critical possibilities of our subfield. As the urgency to explore the relationships between media and the environment becomes clearer, it also feels important to question our own relationships to our academic pursuits. As such, the SIG is invested in understanding how academia can develop greener practices. For example, we are exploring what it means for us, as scholars committed to environmental work, to participate in large annual gatherings. This is something that many organizations are contending with now, and while there's no one clear and easy answer, it is important to push for new low-carbon, environmentally minded initiatives and to articulate how we can, as a group, make concrete changes in our conferencing practices. Additionally, in the upcoming...

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