Building on the success of his latest book, Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker, American University professor Chris Palmer took to the Tedx stage recently and delivered this stirring presentation.
Reposted from: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Confessions-of-a-Wildlife-Filmm
Television networks like Discovery, Animal Planet, National Geographic, and the History Channel are failing to put conservation, education, and animal welfare ahead of ratings and profits when producing and airing films on wildlife. I believe it’s time for wildlife filmmaking to move in a more ethical direction. Wildlife films should not deceive audiences, harass animals, or avoid conservation.
Video Supervisor: Ford Fischer
Filmed by Arun Raman, Delana Listman, and Elaina Kimes
Edited by Elaina Kimes and Ford Fischer
Recorded in The Harold and Sylvia Greenberg Theatre at American University, Washington, DC
Chris Palmer has spearheaded the production of more than 300 hours of original programming for prime-time television and the giant screen IMAX industry, including the Disney Channel, TBS, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, and PBS. Palmer and his colleagues have won numerous awards, including two Emmys, and an Oscar nomination. He founded the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University in 2005, a year after joining AU’s full-time faculty as Distinguished Film Producer in Residence. His book Shooting in the Wild has been made into a film for public television, and his new memoir, Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker, has just been published.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx
Added Jul 10, 2015
Deadline: October 1, 2015.
The University of Florida’s TRACE journal publishes online peer-reviewed collections in ecology, posthumanism, and media studies. Providing an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, we focus on the ethical and material impact of technology. TRACE Innovation Initiative’s second call for papers, “Ecoplay: Digital Games and Environmental Rhetoric,†focuses on digital games and asks how play contributes to ecological thought.
Building on M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer’s Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America as well as Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey’s Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, this issue proposes “Ecoplay†as a rhetorical framework for investigating the intersection of gameplay and ecocriticism. Both Ecospeak and Ecosee explore how rhetorical forms encourage support and sympathy for environmental movements. Specifically, Ecospeak identifies rhetorical patterns in writing about environmental politics and argues that discourse is a fundamental part of the environmental problem. Meanwhile, Ecosee claims that image-based media plays a powerful role in shaping arguments about ecology, environment, and nature. Examining play as a catalyst for environmental discourse, Ecoplay critically considers existing and potential rhetorics of digital ecologies and evaluates how games make arguments about nature.
Games often perpetuate problematic ideologies about human-nature-technology relationships by offering a platform for environmental consumption, resource management, colonization, cultivation, etc. At the same time, game designers and players can challenge entrenched ecological narratives or promote conservation efforts through digital worlds. TRACE’s “Ecoplay†issue seeks a comprehensive way of engaging the interplay between multiple forms of ecological rhetoric in digital games and ‘plays’ with how the multi-modality of games enables rhetorical forms to interact. Thus, contributions to this issue of TRACE should explore how digital games configure our understandings of ecologies and ecological issues through their design, play, and materiality.
Paper topics may include, but are not limited to, any of the following as they relate to digital games:
- Ethics and rhetorics of play, interface, or design
- Representations of nature, ecology, or environment
- Wildlife or resource management
- Ecological conservation or preservation
- “Green†games
- E-waste and pollution
- Built environments, construction, and destruction
- Agriculture, gardening, and urbanization
- Media ecologies
- Posthumanism
Completed articles will be peer-reviewed and should be between 3000-6000 words in length. Multimedia submissions are accepted and encouraged. If you are interested in contributing to the TRACE Innovation Initiative’s second issue, please send a 500 word abstract to trace.at.english.ufl.edu by Oct. 1, 2015.
International Conference: Political Ecologies of Conflict, Capitalism and Contestation (PE-3C)
When: 7-9 July 2016
Where: Hotel Wageningse Berg, Wageningen, The Netherlands
Organised by: Wageningen University and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
We seem to have entered a new phase in the relation between violence and environment. This includes not just unprecedented surges of wildlife crime and associated military style retaliation, but also the conflicts and contestations that arise from structural unequal access to resources (ironically often exacerbated by environmental policies), and the epistemic and intellectual domination of specific ways of understanding, representing and enacting natures, animals and environments. These forms of conflict and violence are (again) becoming an ever more central aspect of the political ecologies of late capitalism and warrant renewed attention, conceptualization and critique.
This international conference aims to bring together scholars, activists, non-governmental and governmental change-makers and interested individuals to discuss and increase our understanding of the causes, consequences, natures and politics of these dynamics and so inspire and understand contested 21st century political ecologies. A second objective of the conference is to contribute to a broader understanding of the meaning and nature of political ecology in the 21st century. Political ecology, as the study of how different interests, forms of power and politics influence and frame access to, use and understand the environment, has become a mature field of academic and activist inquiry. One of the untapped strengths of this field is that those who call themselves political ecologists work within a wide variety of different disciplines, traditions and academic cultures. The aim of this conference is to bring these different disciplines, traditions and cultures together and so connect important discussions on the political ecologies of conflict, capitalism and contestation.
Paper and Panel themes: proposals for papers and panels are invited that address a combination of the following themes and issues:
* Resources and land use practices including but not limited to: biodiversity and conservation, agriculture, agroecology, forests, water management, marine resources, etc;
* Drivers of violence and conflict such as inequality, resource access, capitalism, markets, governmental policies, ecotourism, militarization, climate change, science and technology, war and crisis, conservation and development programs;
* Forms and conceptions of violence including but not limited to structural and material forms of violence, symbolic and epistemic violence as well as practices of contestation, resistance and the development of alternatives;
* Conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches to political ecology and beyond: (post-)structuralist, (post-)Marxist, governance studies, ANT, discourse analysis, governmentality, biopolitics, cultural studies, posthumanist, ethnographic, etc.
We invite paper and full panel proposals (with a maximum of 4 paper presentations for 1 panel) for this conference; please send these to politicalecology2016@gmail.com<mailto:politicalecology2016@gmail.com> before 15 December 2015.
Keynote speakers: Philippe Le Billon (University of British Colombia, tbc) Elizabeth Lunstrum (York University)
Place and venue: beautiful Wageningen is an old, small Dutch city in the centre-east of the Netherlands, but only an hour away from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Hotel De Wageningse Berg (the Wageningen Mountain) is situated at the edge of town, in the woods, with a magnificent view over the lower Rhine River.
The festival review section of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies is accepting submissions for the Fall/Winter 2015 issue.  Deadline: 1 September 2015.
NECSUS is an international, double blind peer-reviewed, open-access journal of media studies connected to NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and published by Amsterdam University Press. The journal is multidisciplinary and strives to bring together the best work in the field of media studies across the humanities and social sciences, publishing research that matters and that improves the understanding of media and culture inside and outside the academic community.
The NECSUS film festival review section publishes critical writing on film festivals. It offers a platform for writing that falls between the fast and prolific genre of individual festival reports and the slow and rigorous labor of film festival research. Rather than merely reviewing the latest festival edition, contributors are asked to take a critical distance and reflect upon one or more thematic issues that are relevant to the professional field and/or for media studies. Reviews can be motivated by current affairs but should also tackle issues that tend to remain hidden in the midst of festival buzz. Contributors should not be employed by the festival they are reviewing.
In addition to reviews of single festivals we encourage reviews covering a range of festivals.  We also feature interviews with festival programmers, directors or critics.
For an overview of previous reviews in the section, check here: http://www.necsus-ejms.org/category/reviews/festivalreviews/
General NECSUS submission guidelines apply.  Additional festival review guidelines:
• Maximum 2,500 words
• Focus on up to 3 film festivals
• Include short introductions of the festivals discussed
• Choose one or more issues/themes to structure your critical review
• Provide URLs of the mentioned festivals
• Include your name and affiliation at the end of the review (no short bios needed)
If you are interested in writing a festival review please contact the section editors Marijke de Valck (marijke.at.filmfestivalresearch.org) and Skadi Loist (skadi.at.filmfestivalresearch.org).
Deadline: 500-word abstracts by September 30, 2015; accepted abstracts’ first drafts by 11 April 2016.
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the
           open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and
           beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was
           the tiny, fragile human body.Â
~ Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1992), p.84.
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism is the journal of ASLE-UKI (the UK-Ireland branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). It is a peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge and supported by Bath Spa University and the University of Worcester. Green Letters explores interdisciplinary interfaces between humans and the natural and built environment. Submissions are now invited for our themed February 2017 issue ‘Modern Warfare and the Environment’ to be edited by Anna Stenning (University of Worcester) and Samantha Walton (Bath Spa University).
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This timely issue of Green Letters – during the four-year anniversary of the First World War – will address the range of approaches that ecocriticism can bring to examining representations of modern warfare, and how the language of war has been appropriated for ‘environmentalist’ causes. Since the First World War, industrial warfare has harnessed the power of ‘nature’ to create ever-more efficient means of destroying human life, through its use of chemical, biological and nuclear technology. At the same time, it has developed the potential to cause what has been termed ecocide, for example, the long-term impact of herbicides in Vietnam, and the Kuwaiti oil fires. Conflict in resource-deprived nations can lead to the mass-movement of refugees into environments that may not be able to support them. And yet, it was investigation by the US military – in an attempt to control the environment – that led to the first research into climate change. Climate change itself has been regarded as an issue for ‘national security’, and a war that ‘we are fighting’.
 As in other areas of modern life, in warfare nature has been understood as: ‘either logistical problems to be overcome and defeated or opportunities to be exploited’ (Colonel Richard W. Fisher, ‘The Environment and Military Strategy’ in Air & Space Power Journal (June 2003).  While there is both a lack of international and domestic safeguarding of the environment in wartime, there is a growing realisation that work to protect the environment both during and after wartime increases the prospects for peace (UNEP nd: 2). As climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion increase the potential for global conflict, this special edition asks, how does literature, film, music or art represent the relationship between humans and the environment during wartime? What language, forms, imagery and tropes do authors use to describe the impacts on the environment of war? And, conversely, how do the discourses of ‘war’ and ‘national security’ compare to other ways of framing climate change and environmental crisis? Â
 As well as addressing the impacts of war on non-human nature, this issue will consider how ecocriticism may also offer the tools to consider the impact of war on human ecology. How does the virtualisation of war affect humans? How can feminist and ecocritical insights into the relationship between language, discourse, and real world oppression of women and nature be developed to inform understanding of man’s destruction of man in wartime? The experiences of warfare may reveal more about our psychological interdependencies with non-human nature than has hitherto been realised. We are also interested in exploring the materiality of the human body as a site of ecological disruption through the impact of depleted uranium or water scarcity caused by war. Finally, this issue should address how we can reconcile struggles for national security with the evidence of interconnectedness, both ecological and cultural, across the planet.
 Authors are encouraged to consider, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Climate change as a ‘national security’ issue
- Environmental apocalypse and the language(s) of war
- Landscapes of war and remembrance
- Industrialism or technology and warfare
- Nationalism and nature
- Environmentalism across national borders
- The gender of the battlefield
- Postcolonial warscapes and decolonisation
- Matter as cultural residue
- ‘Fighting talk’: the language of war in environmentalism
- Nature as resource
- Futures of conflict
- War and land aesthetics.
 To have a submission considered please send an abstract (approximately 500 words) to both Anna Stenning (anna.stenning.at.gmail.com) and Samantha Walton (s.walton.at.bathspa.ac.uk). The abstract itself should be attached as an anonymous document in Word with a covering email that should give your name, address and institutional affiliation. The deadline for abstracts is 30 September 2015. A decision as to which articles will be commissioned will be made by 30 November 2015.Â
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Once again this fall, IECA Executive Director Mark S. Meisner will be teaching The IECA’s online course Environmental Communication: Research Into Practice.
If you are interested in learning more about the field or brushing up, please have a look at the details of the course. Here is the brief description.
This course will explore how the most relevant research and theory from fields such as communication, psychology, sociology, and political science can be used to improve the practice of science, sustainability and environmental communication. Participants will get an overview of the field as we will examine how language, images, and media come together in advocacy and social marketing campaigns, and other forms of public participation for environmental protection. We will consider how communication is used to accomplish practical goals, as well as how it affects people’s perceptions of nature and environmental affairs. To do this we will use readings, examples, cases, recorded lectures, discussions, and the insights of leaders in the field. Participants will have the opportunity to work on communication projects that are relevant to their specific interests.
In case you are wondering, this is a full-length course that runs twice a week for 10 weeks.
Registration is limited to about 20 people and it is already one-third full.
DEADLINE: August 5th, 2015
Over the years, media archeology and new materialism have provided a useful counterbalance to some of the limitations encountered in the textual and cultural studies oriented approaches found in more traditional lines of cinema and media theory. More recently, as a growing body scholarship on media and the environment gets taken up, these archeological and materialist approaches have appealed to ecomedia and environmental humanities scholars as a means of thinking through the sustained ecological impact of media technology on the environment in less representational—and more ontological—terms.
However, at the same time as this blended theoretical approach appears complimentary, certain counterproductive tensions remain. The object-oriented tendencies of new materialism and the techno-centrism of media archeology also frequently subvert certain forms of political engagement within the wider critical spectrum of environmental media studies. For example, while the work of Seigfried Zielinksi and Jussi Parikka seem to offer useful ways of considering the “deep time†of media technology’s impact on environments by showing how geological time scales might be integrated seamlessly within the critical discourse of the anthropocene, these very same archeological and materialist traditions often marginalize the post-human, post-anthropocentric, and feminist critique of scholars like Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. More generally, the overemphasis on object-oriented ontology within environmental media studies tends to prevent an adequate engagement with critical race and gender studies—as well as structural concerns facing the Global South (including media access, asymmetrical modernization, e-waste and media disposal, and socio-economic risk).
This panel is seeking papers that work through the uptake of archeological and materialist theory within environmental media studies, in relation to film, digital cinema, games, or video.
The following topics are of particular interest:
- Animal and post-human studies
- Capitalist excess, speculation, and precarity
- “Deep time†and expansion of temporal scales (via media geology, the anthropocene, etc.)
- Digital media, big data
- Gender and feminisms
- Globalization and post-colonialism
- Intersections of ecological and technological networks
- Management/disavowal of environmental risk
- Materiality of media (light, petroleum, minerals, etc.)
- Media ecology and capitalism
- Media industries and (asymmetrical) modernity
- Media waste, disposal, and recycling
- Queer ecologies, ecofeminism, and environmental justice
- Speculative genres (e.g. science fiction, cli-fi, cybernetics, apocalyptic or disaster narratives)
Please send abstract (max. 300 words) plus bibliography (3-5 entries) and author bio (50-100 words) to Rachel Webb Jekanowski at rachel.jekanowski.at.concordia.ca and Ken Rogers at krogers1.at.yorku.ca by August 5, 2015. Please include “SCMS†in your subject-line.
Deadline: August 10, 2015
To participate in a presconstituted panel sponsored by the Film and Media Festivals SIG, please submit a summary no longer than 2500 characters, 3-5 bibliographic sources, and an author bio no longer than 500 characters.
Please copy and paste your proposal into the body of the email message (and avoid sending attachments!) and include in the subject heading “Film Festival SCMS paper (or workshop) submission.â€
Email your proposal to co-chairs Michael Talbott (michael.talbott. at.castleton.edu) and Tamara Falicov (tfalicov.at.ku.edu) and graduate student representative Antoine Damiens (a_damie.at.live.concordia.ca)
Once we have received your proposals and they have been organized into compelling panels, you will be contacted by your designated panel chair. Only the designated panel chair may submit the final panel/workshop proposal for all its members.
For tips how to prepare and submit a successful proposal or a panel see the SCMS website at http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=call_for_submissions