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 2. Ecoplay: the rhetorics of games about nature 3. Visualizing ecocritical euphoria in Red Dead Redemption 2 4. Stereoscopic rhetorics: model environments, 3D technologies, and decolonizing data collection 5. If a tree falls: mediations into and of natural sound 6. (Re)placing the rhetoric of scale: ecoliteracy, networked writing, and MEmorial mapping 7. Imagining the Eastern Garbage Patch: ocean plastics as a problem of representation and scale 8. Meaning in the growing, the harvest, the weaving, the making: Indigenous technologies at Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Homesite 9. Translating nature: manipulation of natural landscape in contemporary digital photography 10. (Re)coding environmental activism: an examination of Hike Wild Montana 11. I See the Body Electrate
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.
