Media, Culture and the Environmental Turn

Explores the development of an increasing `environmental turn’ in the humanities and social sciences with a focus on the role played by various forms of media in developing and expanding notions of nature and the natural. The book is suitable for students in environment-themed courses in anthropology, sociology, politics, literature and design.

Media, Culture and the Environmental Turn approaches the broad range of debates around the growth of academic interest in the environment from a critical cultural studies perspective. Paying close attention to public debates surrounding the environment it examines the role played by various forms of media in developing and expanding notions relating to concepts of nature and the natural. Chapters will range widely from the beginnings of distinctly ‘modern’ environmental concerns in works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), through area case studies including the complex situation of a country like Bangladesh, to more thematic concerns such as deserts and oceans and worlds ‘without’ elements currently present. Chapters will examine contemporary strands of activism and global and local debates around ‘climate change’ and its implications. The book covers ecological ethics, eco-criticism, ‘slow violence’, ‘carbon democracy’ and the environmental implications of modern media themselves. In addition, it examines how such discourses have come to be problematised and politicised and fought over in the public domain. Ultimately, the problematic of the book will situate the debates at the transnational level and attempt to describe and ‘imagine’ new forms of post-national, transglobal solidarities and the forms of human future implied in their emergence.