Department of English

Environmental Media: We will be engaging with an array of film and media texts and objects to understand the mutual entanglements of media and environment. Media Infrastructures like cell towers and fiber optic cables are part of the environment and elements mined from the environment find themselves in digital media devices. We will be watching and analyzing films (including environmental documentaries and eco-horror cinema) about climate change issues, wildlife, marine organisms, nuclear wastes and pressing matters of the anthropocene. We would be interrogating the green futures of cloud computing and Internet of Things. In this course, we ask: can media be conceptualized in an ecological way? In what ways does the environment shape media? What are the environmental impacts of media infrastructures like data servers? How can we interpret mediated representations of environmental disasters? In what ways can media studies and media practices contribute to urban planning and sustainable ecosystems?