Results for: pringle

KNOW 36059: Media, Environment, and Risk

  • Course Level: Graduate; undergraduate with permission
  • Department:
  • Year: 2020-21
  • Term: Winter

Thomas Pringle

This seminar reads the debates on risk in environmental studies alongside the emergence of risk criticism in media theory to interrogate the probabilistic thinking inherent to the mass communication of ecological hazard. A common characteristic of recent environmental catastrophes ranging from Bhopal, Fukushima Daiichi, Deepwater Horizon, Exxon Valdez, Hurricane Katrina, and the varied crises of global climate change, is that knowledge about unfolding ecological disaster involves the communication of environmental risk—whether imperceptible or probable—by media. This seminar offers graduate students methodological training to discern how risk is geographically and historically organized in parallel with the knowledge politics of distributing risk information through journalism, documentary, and digital media. Illustrated by readings and nonfiction media objects that record historical case studies of ecological crises, this seminar analyzes key epistemological concepts drawn from environmental studies and media theory, including uncertainty, ignorance, resilience, environmental racism, prediction, and prevention. This course is interdisciplinary and welcomes students with interests in environmental studies, film and media studies, environmental history, environmental sociology and SSK, STS, and the environmental humanities.

KNOW 36072: Compiling and Mediating Environmental History

  • Course Level:
  • Department:
  • Year: 2020-21
  • Term: Spring

Thomas Pringle

How do audiovisual media archives inform both the research and presentation of environmental history? This course looks at a series of documentary films and online media projects that show how the history of society-environmental interactions in site-specific areas have long-lasting effects. For example, John Gianvito’s documentary Vapor Trail Clark (2010) uses archival visual material and interviews to narrate the environmental history of the U.S. Clark Airforce Base in the Philippines. Established as sovereign territory during the period of American colonialism, the U.S. government abandoned the site when a nearby volcanic eruption buried a large section of the grounds. The Filipino government repurposed the buildings to house those displaced by the volcano, turning the vacated base into an ad-hoc refugee camp. Soon after, the underground stores of fuel, flame retardants, weapons, and insecticides left by the U.S. military entered the water table and consequently the Filipino environmental refugees faced severe health complications for years. In the seminar, students analyze such media objects alongside readings in environmental history and documentary media theory. Synthesizing these disciplinary resources encourages students to understand place through both how historians write about socio-environmental change and how audiovisual media index ecologies. In consultation with the instructor, the goal of this interdisciplinary engagement is to guide students toward a final project that employs both research and creation to produce an environmental historical case study that utilizes a media archive to make the argument. For instance, this may be a short essay film remixing footage from mid-century Hollywood cinema that recorded natural landscapes since lost to development, or a digital exhibition using the publishing platform Scalar to map how a group of activists use YouTube to communicate ecological problems, or a written study that reconstructs how a fenceline community suffers from environmental racism by analyzing photographic archives alongside readings from social geography, and so on. This course shows how humanistic inquiry into documentary media and the material conditions of media production can inform the assembly and presentation of environmental historical knowledge. Students with interests in film and media studies, history, environmental studies, and the environmental humanities will share with their peers how both media and memory record socio-ecological history. Production experience is not required.