Green Mediography

As the repercussions of the impending climate crisis become more tangible, the creation and use of ‘Green Media’ formats that contribute to climate communication, environmental literacy, sustainable future imaginaries and ecological citizenship/identities, is rapidly expanding both as a media phenomenon and research area, making it increasingly difficult to navigate.

To address this, the Green Media Studies initiative has received funding from the strategic theme Pathways to Sustainability at Utrecht University to create an annotated mediography, i.e. an online repository of ‘green media’ See e.g. Parham, John. 2016. Green Media and Popular Culture, An Introduction. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. examples used in processes of environmental communication, epistemic eco-practices See e.g. Kane, Carolyn. 2018. “The Toxic Sublime: Landscape Photography and Data Visualization.” Theory, Culture & Society 35 (3): 121–47 on the transition from landscape photography to data visualization as a means of ‘seeing’ nature. and climate action/activism.

The goals of this project are to…

  • … facilitate a media-comparative perspective on the epistemic and societal functions as well as distinct advantages and disadvantages of ‘green media’, including well-studied phenomena like eco-cinema and climate fiction literature, but also more recent phenomena like eco-theatre or sustainability apps.
  • … provide a ‘toolkit’ for academic and societal partners to understand how ‘green media’, individually and in combinations, can support their sustainability-oriented (research) activities, but also how these media act as epistemic objects (see e.g. Khazraee, Emad, and Susan Gasson. 2015. ‘Epistemic Objects and Embeddedness: Knowledge Construction and Narratives in Research Networks of Practice.’ Information Society 31 (2): 139–59.) https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2015.998104. that inform the creation, interpretation and exchange of knowledge and shared concepts in the process.

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