1st Edition
Mediating Nature The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy
Mediating Nature considers how technology acts as a mediating device in the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. Scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric, and this book engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry to shift focus onto the making of images.
Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking. Part of the book’s larger argument is that analysis of mediations of nature must develop more critical tools of analysis toward the very mediating technologies that produce such media. That is, to truly understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies.
Ultimately, Mediating Nature contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of Ecocriticism, Ecocomposition, Media Ecology, Visual Rehtoric, and Digital Literacy Studies.
1. Mediating interfaces: getting in between
Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey
2. Ecoplay: the rhetorics of games about nature
Melissa Bianchi
3. Visualizing ecocritical euphoria in Red Dead Redemption 2
Steve Holmes
4. Stereoscopic rhetorics: model environments, 3D technologies, and decolonizing data collection
Shannon Butts
5. If a tree falls: mediations into and of natural sound
Joe Marshall Hardin
6. (Re)placing the rhetoric of scale: ecoliteracy, networked writing, and MEmorial mapping
Madison Jones
7. Imagining the Eastern Garbage Patch: ocean plastics as a problem of representation and scale
Dan Brayton
8. Meaning in the growing, the harvest, the weaving, the making: Indigenous technologies at Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Homesite
Lisa King
9. Translating nature: manipulation of natural landscape in contemporary digital photography
Anastasia Kozak
10. (Re)coding environmental activism: an examination of Hike Wild Montana
Glen Southergill
11. I See the Body Electrate
Jason Crider
Biography
Sidney I. Dobrin is Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is the founding director/editor of TRACE Innovation Initiative.
Sean Morey is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.
