Blue Media Ecologies - AFV0000506

• Title: Blue Media Ecologies
• Guaranteed by: Film Studies Department (21-KFS)
• Faculty: Faculty of Arts
• Actual: from 2024
• Semester: summer
• Points: 0
• E-Credits: 4
• Examination process: summer s.:
• Hours per week, examination: summer s.:2/2, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (unknown)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Is provided by: AFV0000445
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment
• Guarantor: Mgr. Jana Rogoff, Ph.D.

Annotation

Blue media studies is a discourse emerging on the nexus of blue humanities, ecocriticism, and ecomedia theory. As media scholars and ecocritics including Nicole Starosielski, Sidney Dobrin, Sean Cubitt, and Laura Marks have shown in recent years, blue spaces have come to play an increasingly important role in the transmission of audiovisual media across the planet. At the same time, digital media infrastructure situated in these spaces has historically been obscured from our sight: “the materiality of the global media infrastructure is rendered through the use of undersea cable systems and airborne cloud networks that mask the expansive scale of media’s physical presence in the environment” (Rust and Wurth 2024). Through the study of ecomedia theory texts and multinational audiovisual material, the course strives, firstly, to advance our awareness of media’s material presence and their environmental cost, and, secondly, to examine strategies of representing blue [watery] spaces from an ecocritical point of view, as an amalgam of the natural and cultural, in audiovisual forms such as documentary film, live-action, and animation.

The course takes place biweekly.

1. February 27th
2. March 13th
3. March 27th
4. April 10th
5. April 24th
6. May 15th

Last update: Rogoff Jana, Mgr., Ph.D. (07.01.2025)

Course completion requirements

Active participation in discussions of the reading assignments and of the film viewed at the screening. 

Oral presentation.

Last update: Rogoff Jana, Mgr., Ph.D. (02.01.2025)

Literature

Preliminary Reading:

Balsom, Erica. 2018. An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea. New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Dobrin, Sidney I. 2021. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative. Routledge Environmental Humanities. Abingdon, Oxon New York: Routledge.

Heise, Ursula K. 2002. Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media Theory. Configurations 10 (1): 149-168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2003.0006 

Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Elements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rust, Stephen, and Verena Wurth. 2024. Blue Media Ecologies. Swimming through the Mediascape with Sir David Attenborough. The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies. Edited by Antonio López, Adrian Ivakhiv, Stephen Rust, Miriam Tola, Alenda Y.Chang and Kiu-wai Chu. Oxon, New York: Routledge, 51-58.

Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. SST, Sign, Storage, Transmission. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Vaughan, Hunter. 2019. “Five Hundred Thousand Kilowatts of Stardust”: Water and Resource Use in Movies and the Marketing of Nature. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret. The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies. New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 59-90.

Last update: Rogoff Jana, Mgr., Ph.D. (02.01.2025)