MEDIA 332
Eco/media
Please note: this is archived course information from 2020 for MEDIA 332.
Description
"Eco/media" responds to the increasingly significant role that nature, environment and ecology play in contemporary audiovisual popular culture. This fairly recent trend in critical awareness and intellectual work is partly a response to our increasing awareness that humans may have become agents of irreversible planetary change; an epoch now called the “Anthropocene.”
Our approach in this course will be as varied as ecocritical pursuits themselves. We will look at how environmentalism is communicated in film, on television and (to some extent) online, how we think, feel and act in response to images of environmental crisis, how gazing at animals simultaneously reminds us of our connection to them and what it means to distinguish ourselves as human.
Environmentalism and ecology are not simply literary, cinematic or televisual tropes. We will also use ecological frameworks to think about the factors that shape media and to think about the materiality of cultural products we have become accustomed to think of as "weightless" and ephemeral.
Availability 2020
Semester 1
Lecturer(s)
Lecturer(s) Associate Professor Sarina Pearson
Points
MEDIA 332: 15 points
Prerequisites
30 points at Stage II in Media, Film and Television or Global Environment and Sustainable Development
Restrictions
FTVMS 231, FTVMS 332, MEDIA 231
