Who's afraid of the ecological apocalypse? Climate change and the production of the ethical subject

Contemporary representations of environmental futures often feature disastrous, apocalyptic and catastrophic scenarios, particularly in film and popular culture. One site in which this representation is prominent is in the climate change debate, where such narratives in relation to the environment can be found not only in popular culture, but also governmental statements (Brown, 2009; Huhne, 2011; King, 2004; Obama, 2010; Stern, 2006) and academic literature produced by Politics and International Relations (Caney, 2010; Dobson, 1999; Gardiner, 2009; Garvey, 2008; Hiskes, 2005; Page, 2007). Whilst disastrous scenarios are of course not new in the construction of political and ethical possibilities, the climate change debate has arguably occasioned an intensification of such scenarios and an increased interlacing of them into political and ethical narratives - to the extent that Mike Hulme (2006) argues that recent years have seen the birth of a 'new environmental phenomenon' of 'catastrophic climate change'. However, despite the ubiquity of such dire warnings, they seem to have motivated relatively little action by citizens on climate matters (Hulme, 2009)

The Common Law of Landscape Hostility in the Lives and Deaths of Honeybees

This article offers a legal explanation for the decline of honeybees. While most investigations into bee populations and bee survival rates have been scientific, this article provides an additional set of causes, showing how our legal definitions of property and standards of negligence contribute to a landscape hostile to the lives of bees. Examining recent litigation in the United States and Canada, it shows how legal concepts of property impact the lives of bees, especially in cases of pesticide overspray near property boundaries, and in the forms of knowledge and ignorance in play in contesting duties of care in negligence cases. By expanding our understanding of the causes of bee death, this article points toward additional ways in which the stressors that bees face might be reduced

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

On the aesthetics of intermedial referencing in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Responsible filmmaking: ethics and spectatorship through the lens of Michael Haneke

My dissertation uses, as starting point, an interview with Michael Haneke in which the Austrian filmmaker criticises Downfall and Schindler's List for manipulating audiences and for generating entertainment from real-life and unspeakable horrors. He argues that filmmakers have a responsibility to enable audiences to form their own opinion regarding a film and its subject matter. I set forth to engage, theorise and develop Haneke's call for responsibility by asking the following questions as I move chronologically through his films: why is responsible filmmaking important, how does Haneke approach his own filmmaking and how does a responsible approach to filmmaking influence the position of spectators. Firstly, I draw from Stanley Cavell's film theory to read our current experience in a media saturated society, describing the ways in which the media positions and influences the characters' understanding of the world and their relationships with each other in The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Thereafter, I discuss Haneke's use of genre in Funny Games, the long take and continuity editing in Code Unknown, music in The Piano Teacher and sound in Time of the Wolf to analyse Haneke's approach to filmmaking. My readings are underpinned by Cavell's understanding of automatism and the manner in which Haneke uses and reflects upon film's automatisms. Finally, I illustrate Levinas' concept of responsibility for the Other through a reading of Georges and Majid's relationship in Caché, Kelly Oliver's work on witnessing in The White Ribbon and Judith Butler's work on responsibility in Amour in order to demonstrate how Haneke's responsibility ensures the audience's response-ability

The Poetics of Settler Fatalism: Responses to Ecocide from within the Anthropocene

It is impossible to think today, without thinking of the Anthropocene. As biospheres are pushed ever-closer towards exhaustion, collapse, and/or radically inhospitable transmutations, there is a simultaneous explosion of work striving to represent and understand this epoch. However, the Anthropocene should not be thought in isolation from other social, political, and ecological processes. In this paper, I investigate the Anthropocene’s intersection with settler colonialism. Of particular interest to this paper are the metaphorical and narrative accounts about wastelanded spaces; that is, how meaning is ascribed to the local manifests of the Anthropocene as they are birthed on colonized territories. I ask what sort of futurities or recuperations are imagined as extant within the Anthropocene; in particular, whether possibilities for anti-colonial futures are imagined as existing within or emerging from wastelanded spaces.    I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”

Do you feel like a hero yet?

Video games have a long tradition of including elements of moral decision making within their ludic and narrative structures. While the success of these endeavours has been mixed, the systems used to express moral choices within a game have grown more popular. However, these morality systems are inherently restricted and limited by ludic and business considerations. Coupled to this is the concept of the magic circle in which games are considered to be morally discontinuous spaces where the normal rules of what actions are and are not permitted are different. Moral choices then become flattened down into mere narrative flavouring rather than a reflection of an individuals ethical makeup. Moral choices within games are thus shallow and lack the ability to truly offer us an opportunity to reflect on the actions we have taken. Rather than offering insight, they instead cheapen and simplify nuanced topics and concepts. However, several games released in the past few years have made an effort to break free of this mould by explicitly externalising moral choices. In this paper we discuss two of these games: Popes 2013 title Papers, Please and Yager Developments 201

SEEING BEYOND PLAY: THE IMMERSIVE WITNESS IN VIDEO GAMES

Ian Bogost\u27s 2011 book How to Do Things with Video Games seeks to reveal a small portion of the many uses of video games and how together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant (p. 7). I aspire to join Bogost\u27s conversation by offering another use for video games--the video game as a site of immersive witnessing. To showcase how witnessing can be meaningfully utilized in video games, I present case studies of two vastly disparate games: commercial entertainment game Telltale\u27s The Walking Dead and not-for-profit game Half the Sky Movement: The Game. My method of analysis traces rhetorical and design forms (including narrative, duration, immersion, choice, and reflection) that contribute to my conception of an immersive witnessing experience. Achieved through games\u27 immersive and agentic properties, witnessing through games involves different emotional and thought processes than other media. This model not only potentially appeals to new audiences but also engages those audiences in a distinctly different way from media of the past

Constitutional patriotism and the post-national paradox: an exploration of migration, identity and loyalty at the local level

Theorists of constitutional patriotism argue that the binding sentiment of shared national identity can be replaced with allegiance to universal principles, interpreted into particular constitutions through ongoing deliberative processes. In this thesis, I explore the implications of such an approach for the defensibility of restrictions on migration, a subject which has previously received very little attention. I argue that constitutional patriotism implies a commitment to the free movement of individuals across borders; but that freedom of movement itself creates challenges for the implementation of constitutional patriotism. This is because it may increase anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiment in the host community. I term this phenomenon the ‘post-national paradox’. I then draw on independently collected qualitative data on Eastern European migration to English rural communities to explore this post-national paradox. I analyse the argumentative strategies, as the well as the perceptions of difference, evident in justifications of anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment in these contexts. I highlight both perceptions of cultural and economic threat, as well as a ‘banal’ sense of national loyalty, underpinning such attitudes; and suggest that discursive practice at the most local level is necessary for the bottom up construction, or growth, of an inclusive form of identity and belonging

My watch begins : identification and procedural rhetoric on second screens and social networks.

Digital rhetoric creates opportunities for examining rhetoric as it evolves daily. This evolution may be described in terms of network circulation and immediate opportunities for publishing and creating. This project analyzes mobile applications and live feeds used during television broadcasts, where rhetoric is closely tied to the work of identifying with another point of view. Producers and designers of dual-screen applications prompt us to answer how we would act if we assumed the role of protagonist and saw the world through her or his eyes. These questions support the idea that identification is not just a relative of empathy or a way to engage emotionally with the text but also a way to approach problems and sharpen observation. From this dissertation’s findings we may reconsider the work of seeing and perspectival shifting as part of a sophisticated procedure of reflexive role play and public intellectualism. In addition, the analysis provides information about how mobile devices and second screens work to support consensus and a preferred reading (viewing) of popular narratives and group performances, thereby calling into careful consideration how we use such devices to influence others. Finally, the dissertation’s work helps us understand new forms of viral communication and the velocity (Ridolfo and DeVoss) at which they are transmitted. Consequently, we may approach textual artifacts as “living documents” and consider how such “living” properties may change our perceptions of authorship and composing. In Chapter One, “My Watch Begins: Complex Narrative, Transmedia, and Point of View,” I begin by offering an overview of my methodological approach to these applications. I situate the work of identification on mobile devices within the larger conversation surrounding transmedia and how it encourages viewers to participate in contemporary television narratives. This section provides explanations of how the terms procedural rhetoric (as introduced first by Ian Bogost), prosopopoiea (from ancient rhetoric), and point of view (from narrative theory) will function in this project, with most of the attention given to procedural and rhetorical studies of the various programs and websites associated with audience writings. This chapter also calls attention to the difference between empathy and perspective shifting. An example from contemporary culture that helps illustrate this difference and provides space for conversation is the viral blog post “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” This editorial, written in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, features identification techniques used as persuasive tools but does so in a problematic way that might be better handled with a nuanced and careful study of how identification operates in other settings. Central to this project are questions addressing how we discuss and document the acts of viewing/seeing/looking, and in what ways the process of seeing from multiple perspectives is currently being lauded in society and the academy. In Chapter Two, “If You See Something, Say Something: Syncing Audience Viewing and Response,” I reveal two opening examples that illustrate these premises: one from a Walking Dead advertisement that features the protagonist’s eye and one from a Department of Homeland Security ad-“If You See Something, Say Something.” These examples dovetail into a specific analysis of syncing devices, or dual screen viewing experiences, and the actual rhetoric accompanying the requests to see from multiple perspectives (“If you were Rick, you would ___”). I also call attention to shows where the act of identifying with the protagonist raises questions about the limitations of perspectives. To be specific, I suggest that the white middle-class male is the paradigm of identification exercises for shows that encourage participation from viewers. Examples from television suggest that women and minorities are less likely to be the characters with whom we align our interests; therefore, I argue we should interrogate this trend and think reflexively about the act of identifying. In Chapter Three, “Choreographing Conversation through Tagging, Tokens, and Reblogs,” I argue that analysis of audience reactions via live feeds and blogging platforms shows that textual artifacts, through increased circulation, promote a certain form of identification through consensus. This consensus reveals the tendency of viewers to gravitate toward preferred readings (viewings) of narratives and to identify with characters closely resembling themselves. By constituting viewers in a rhetoric specific to each fictional world, producers encourage identification and help secure appropriate and largely positive viewer behaviors through conversations online. Specifically, digital activities like “checking in” to a show and writing with specific hashtags become markers of narrative involvement. Producers, in turn, engage in reciprocal action by promoting or displaying fan activity on their own feeds, thereby sponsoring the work of the audience. While such activity often leads to conformity, I argue that these moments of group consensus may act as springboards for future conversation about other perspectives and narrative outcomes. In Chapter Four, “Texts as Bodies, Bodies as Texts: Tumblr Role Play and the Rhetorical Practices of Identification,” the rhetorical analysis of these online sites and mobile applications then leads to questions of how we perceive embodiment during identification. In this section I look closely at the writing found on the microblogging site Tumblr, where viewers of television narrative engage in role playing their favorite protagonists and creating dialogue with fellow role players. This practice, operating outside the jurisdiction of producer-designed apps, reveals new patterns of the work of identification. With attention to the ideas of Katherine Hayles and Deleuze and Guattari, we may reconsider how text, once circulated, acts as an extension of and a replacement for the physical body. Still, the work of these bloggers demonstrates that identification is still a personal investment that refers to and gives credit to the person behind the computer screen. This chapter reveals a productive tension between the embodied author’s work and the nature of writing as it moves through networks. In my conclusion I explain how these applications and online tools have implications for the writing classroom. Students are frequently told that good writers and thinkers must see a problem or an issue from multiple perspectives. This project focuses intensely on the work of shifting perspectives and how those perspectives are represented in writing. Its implications for teaching productive source integration and research may be applied to the first-year writing classroom but also the graduate class curriculum, where novice scholars learn to extend, oppose, and ally themselves with the scholars who have come before them