Apples and Glaciers: Students Spark Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations

It is an honor to be here. I want to begin by thanking the library for supporting so many of us in our creative and scholarly work. Quite frankly, it would be impossible for me to do my work without these amazing librarians. They deserve the real applause at this event! Robin invited my colleague, Dr. Sarah Principato and me to give these opening remarks. Sarah, however, had to give a research talk at Franklin & Marshall, so she was unsure if she would be back in time. I am happy to see that she has been able to make it back, and is here, lending her support from the audience. Robin wanted us to be this year’s faculty representatives because of two things that mark our research experiences as distinctly tied to being active scholars at Gettysburg College. These two things are: Our research collaborations with students, which includes publishing with them. Our regular use of the library’s Cupola open access repository that allows open access to our publications. [Excerpt

Indigenous Film Festivals as Eco-Testimonial Encounter: The 2011 Native Film + Video Festival

In struggles for political and cultural recognition many Indigenous groups employ visual media to make their concerns heard. Amongst these various channels for media activism are Indigenous film festivals which, in the words of festival coordinator Amalia Cόrdova, work to convey ‘a sense of solidarity with Indigenous struggles’. Cόrdova’s essay on Indigenous film festivals appears in the collection Film Festivals and Activism (2012). In the introduction to the collection co-editor Leshu Torchin writes about activist festivals as testimonial encounters or fields of witnessing where the films offer testimony and the audiences serve as witnessing publics, ‘viewers [who] take responsibility for what they have seen and become ready to respond’. To better understand how Indigenous film festivals embody these activist imperatives as eco-activism I consider the case of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival (NAFVF) with its special eco-themed focus Mother Earth in Crisis. In my analysis of NAFVF I consider both the testimonies of the films and the festival context in which they are placed; by doing so I add to the growing scholarship in ecocinema studies which within the last ten years has become a legitimate and crucial aspect of ecocriticism’s purview – though surprisingly, with little attention devoted to film festivals. Through this analysis, by articulating what I term the oblique testimony, I argue that Indigenous film festivals are often strongly reflective of the environmental concerns and hopes of Native peoples and suggest ecological engagements that place them in the terrain of environmental film festivals. [excerpt

An Interview with Julian Agyeman: Just Sustainability and Ecopedagogy

This interview with Julian Agyeman, a key originator of the concept of just sustainability, engages Agyeman in discussion of how just sustainability evolved, and how its theoretical and practical dimensions relate to the principles of ecopedagogy

Feeling and Healing Eco-social Catastrophe: The Horrific Slipstream of Danis Goulet\u27s Wakening

Cree/Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet’s science fiction short Wakening (2013) is set in Canada’s near future, yet the film reveals a slipstream of time where viewers are invited to contemplate the horrors of ecosocial crises—future, past, and present. I argue Wakening, as futuristic ecohorror, produces horrific feelings in the moment of its viewing that are inevitably entangled with the past, inviting its audiences to experience the monstrous contexts of Indigenous lives across time. To articulate this temporal dynamism, I overlay two key conceptual understandings: Walter Benjamin’s critiques of Western progress and historicism, and Indigenous notions of a Native slipstream. When brought together in Wakening, which is inspired by the First Nations movement Idle No More, these concepts not only help expose the horror of Indigenous ecosocial crises wrought by colonial and neocolonial occupations but also draw our attention to the timelessness of Indigenous resistance in the face of such ecohorror. Ultimately, there are two significant implications in understanding Wakening as ecohorror of dynamic temporality. First, such a reading continues the important work of revisioning the theoretical and critical boundaries of Western cinema. Goulet’s play with audiences’ familiar expectations of horror’s invitations to the weird challenge us all to recalibrate our sense of generic cinematic representation and its purpose. Relatedly, such readings highlight film’s politics of emotion: its ability to generate “affective alliances” that can potentially help us all re-imagine our temporal and spatial engagements with the world at large

The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder\u27s The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces

I first saw Métis artist Terril Calder\u27s 2014 stop-frame feature, The Lodge, an independently made, relatively small- budget film, at its premiere at the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts festival, held annually in Toronto, Canada. The feature-length animation played to a full house at the Light-box Theater downtown. Many were there to attend the five-day festival, which is dedicated to Indigenous media made by and for Indigenous people. Others were there because as members of Toronto\u27s general public they wanted to catch a movie during a night out in the city. Since then The Lodge has shown at various other independent venues. It isn\u27t what you might think of as commercial fare. Its audiences are not huge. However, for those who do view The Lodge, the film presents a creative space to rethink our sense of boundaries in a number of ways: boundaries between human/nonhuman, white/Indigenous, male/female, spectator/film-object. In this essay, I argue that the film is thus an invitation to question the naturalness of hegemonic identity assumptions that demarcate such boundaries. I interviewed Calder (via Skype and subsequent email correspondence) soon after I saw the film, and I situate a close textual analysis of the film within the context of her intent and the burgeoning scholarly dialogue between Indigenous studies and ecocritical studies. The scholarly dialogue, as Joni Adamson and I write in the introduction to our recent anthology, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2016), argues for clear sighted understandings of multi-faceted human/more-than-human relationships that exist outside of binaries imposed by Western notions of progress . Similarly, Steven Loft, coeditor of Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, writes of an Indigenous media cosmology that is replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things and that is not predicated on Western foundations of thought (xvi). Calder extends such Indigenous worldviews of connectedness to cinema and animation in particular

In God’s Land: Cinematic Affect, Animation and the Perceptual Dilemmas of Slow Violence

In this paper, I argue that Indian independent filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar\u27s documentary In God’s Land (2012) blends animation and live-action to illuminate the destructive nuances of postcolonial literary scholar, Rob Nixon\u27s notion of slow violence. In turning to cinema, I also suggest that In God’s Land’s “aesthetic strategies” further eco-film scholarship’s recent interests in animation, which have tended to highlight the mode\u27s feel good affect. I draw attention to In God\u27s Land\u27s hybrid of dark, discordant animation spectacle interspliced in the documentary live-action to articulate the potential of eco-animation outside of this affect. Ultimately, the film not only draws attention to animation’s non-playful affect—its potentials and dilemmas, but I also suggest that reading such a film adds postcolonial understandings of cinema beyond the Western/Japanese center on with eco-animation scholars have so far focused

Salma Monani, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies

In this first Next Page column of 2017, Salma Monani, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, shares which films first ignited her passion for research in the environmental humanities – in particular, the intersections of cinema, environmental, and Indigenous studies; how her recent time as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich, Germany) reinforced this passion; suggested reads that range from science fiction and mystery to seminal works in ecocriticism; and which Netflix series she will dive into next

ImagineNATIVE 2012: Ecocinema and The Indigenous Film Festival

Much scholarship points to how ecological concerns are never far from Indigenous struggles for political sovereignty and public participation. In this paper we turn to the Indigenous film festival as a relatively understudied yet rich site to explore such ecological concerns. Specifically, we highlight the ImagineNATIVE 2012 film festival based in Toronto, Canada

Eco-nostalgia in Popular Turkish Cinema

Book Summary: Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. [From the publisher

Environmental Film Festivals: Beginning Explorations at the Intersections of Film Festival Studies and Ecocritical Studies

Drawing from the burgeoning field of film festival studies and its engagement with public sphere theory, I examine environmental film festivals to suggest that their festival terrain is bounded by three end-member festival types, that of the official public sphere, the alternative public sphere, and the corporate or trade-show sphere. Few environmental festivals fall neatly into a single end-member category. Analyzing how they construct their identities suggests the complex ways in which these festivals work to negotiate their presence in a heterogeneous environmental and media landscape and makes room for continued attention to these unique sites of ecocinema engagement