Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2: A Conversation with Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Seán Cubitt

This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research.

Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.

This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.

Speakers:

Stephen Rust is a Senior Instructor of English at the University of Oregon (United States). In addition to co-editing Ecocinema Theory and Practice, he is co-editor of Ecomedia: Key Issues (2016) and The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia  Studies (2023). He is an advisory board member of the journals  Media+ Environment and Journal of Environmental Media and has authored several articles on cinema and the environment.

Salma Monani is Professor at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. She is co-editor, with Steve Rust and Sean Cubitt, of Ecocinema Theory and Practice 1 and 2 (Routledge 2013 and 2022), and Ecomedia: Key Concepts (Routledge/Earthscan 2015), and lead editor (with Joni Adamson) on Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies (Routledge/Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Literature, forthcoming 2016).  She has also extensively published on explorations of film and environmental justice, film festival studies, and Indigenous eco-activism, and is currently working on a monograph: Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Landscapes (contract with University of West Virginia).

Seán Cubitt is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect (MIT 2004), EcoMedia (Rodopi, 2005), The Practice of Light (MIT 2014), Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Duke University Press, 2017), Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Truth (Aesthetic Politics 1) (Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press, 2023). Co-editor of Ecocinema 2 (Routledge, 2023), The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and Practice, Routledge/American Film Institute, 2012 and Ecomedia: Key Issues. London: Earthscan/Routledge, 2015, he is series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. He researches the history and philosophy of media, ecopolitical aesthetics, media arts and technologies and media art history.

Moderator:

Kiu-wai Chu, Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities and Chinese Studies, Nanyang Technological University.