[Commlist] CFP Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Human Worlds

*Call for Book Chapters: *

*/Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Human Worlds/*


Editors Mary Hegedus and Jessica Mulvogue invite book chapter proposals 
for a scholarly collection entitled /Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen 
Encounters with more-than-human worlds/, to be published by Vernon Press.


The current global eco-emergency demands a rethinking and reimagining of 
environments and human beings’ relationship to and within 
more-than-human worlds. The subject of the nonhuman has been central to 
scholarship in the field of ecocinema studies. Anat Pick and Guinevere 
Narraway’s /Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human /(2013), Elena 
Past’s /Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human /(2019), Cajetan Iheka’s 
/African Ecomedia /(2021), James Cahill’s /Zoological Surrealism: The 
Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé/ (2019), Jennifer Fay’s /Inhospitable 
World: Cinema in the time of the Anthropocene/ (2018), and Hunter 
Vaughan’s /Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs 
of the Movies/ (2019)  are just a few examples of work that approaches 
cinema from an ecological perspective to consider how cinema expresses 
the “interconnectedness of human and other life forms [and] our 
implication in and filtering through material networks that enable and 
bind us” (Pick and Narraway 2013: 5).


This book builds on such scholarship but aims to home in on the concept 
of the ecosystem as a specific, situated biological system - involving 
interactions between soil, atmosphere, water and living organisms - that 
is crucial to understanding and coping in the era of ecological 
catastrophe. Studies of mycological interrelationships, interspecies 
kinship, and plant sentience (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015; Donna Haraway 
2006 & 2017; Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers 2012) as well as 
ecocritiques of cinema itself (Sean Cubitt 2020) reveal the 
politico-ethical need to recognize the wide and varied scope of 
interspecies connectivities. Cinema, as a time-based medium, has both a 
distinctive ability to reveal the world and an imaginative, experimental 
capacity to create new worlds. Our affective relations with the 
aesthetic perceptual ecology of screen images (Adrian Ivakhiv 2013) 
helps evolve and deepen our understanding of worlds rich in connection 
and possibility. Furthermore our affiliations with these projected 
ecosystems shape our reality and influence our positions as humans in a 
more-than-human world (Nicole Seymour 2018).


We aim to bring together explorations of ecosystems across cinema and 
media genres. Cinematic ecosystems may appear as background in narrative 
fiction (eg. the Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest in Patricia 
Rozema’s/Into the Forest /(2015)); as the central subject of a 
documentary (eg. Sable Island in Jacqueline Mills’ /Geographies of 
Solitude,/ 2022); or be the study of a scientific film. They may also be 
imaginative and speculative, such as the biological interactions in 
Momoko Seto’s /Planet/ series (2008-17) or speculative futures in Danis 
Goulet’s /Night Raiders/ (2020).


Cinema, as a material process and object, is also implicated in these 
ecologies. As such, the collection recognizes the material relationships 
between cinematic processes and more-than-humans on screen and beyond. 
We are thus also interested in both case studies of cinematic 
interference with ecosystems and the ways in which filmmakers and 
artists work with and alongside biological matter, for instance, in 
hand-processed or plant processed experimental cinema.


The question of knowing - as both rational thought and sensory 
perception - is central to our inquiry: we aim to explore what 
ecosystems on screen - real or imagined - may teach us about 
interrelations with a more-than-human world, about kinship and care, as 
well as about competition and conflict (as Lorraine Code argues  
ecosystems are as cruel as they are kind (2006)). To recognize the 
extent of interrelationships in the more-than-human world is to move 
beyond human exceptionalism towards potentially more just and 
sustainable modes of cohabitation with nonhumans. It is also to 
acknowledge that worlds exist beyond the human that are unreachable and 
unknowable.


Our guiding questions for this collection are: How does cinema and media 
work to articulate ecosystems  and what are the epistemological, 
material, and politico-ethical implications of such articulations? And 
how can cinema and media  aid us in coming to know more-than-human 
worlds and what are the limits of such inquiries?


We are interested in studies of cinematic ecosystems - ie. environments 
on screen: plants, animals, funga, sealife, microbial life - from a wide 
variety of media perspectives and issues, including, but not limited to:


  * Cli-fi; climate change media
  * Feminist and/or Indigenous epistemologies
  * BIPOC, Queer, non-binary ecologies
  * Orphaned and archival footage
  * Media technologies: Drone, micro/macro, time lapse, virtual reality,
    augmented reality, sound, artificial intelligence
  * Perceptual experiences of cinematic environments, perceptual ecologies
  * Media materialities
  * Interspecies kinship / matters of care / posthumanism / relational
    ethics
  * Scientific images: micro/macroscopic, timelapse, geological,
    biological, zoological, etc.
  * Environmental effects of prosperity vs precarity; sacrifice zones
  * Anthropomorphic, biomorphic and geomorphic instantiations of worlds
  * Anthropocene, Chthulucene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, 
Planthropocene
  * Explorations of Uexkull’s Umwelt


We welcome both individual and co-authored pieces for articles of 6000 
words. Please submit your 500-word proposal and a short author bio to 
Mary Hegedus and Jessica Mulvogue via email at (mjhegedus /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(mjhegedus /at/ gmail.com)> and (jessica.mulvogue /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(jessica.mulvogue /at/ gmail.com)> *Proposal Deadline June 30th 2023*


*Timeline: *

Proposal Deadline: June 30th 2023

Acceptance/Non-acceptance notice: end of July 2023

Article submission deadline: January 15th 2024 (articles will undergo 
peer review)

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