New York University
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
Media and the Environment
Professor Nicole Starosielski
411 Lafayette, 3FL
[email protected]
MCC-GE 2XXX
Classroom location TBD
Wed 11:00 AM – 1:10 PM
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will introduce you to the varied ways in which human and natural environments
have been shaped by media representations and technologies, extending from newspapers,
photography, and popular literature, to film, television, and video games. The course integrates
the study of environmental media from diverse disciplinary perspectives, including eco-cinema,
eco-criticism, environmental communication, and environmental studies. It surveys research
from media studies that explores how environments are represented in visual media; from ecocritical texts that detail the specificities of poetic, literary, and artistic approaches to the
environment; and work in environmental communication that documents the role of the mass
media, including the Internet, broadcast television, and news programs, in the dissemination of
environmental messages. The course will also interrogate the diverging functions of
environmental media in different historical periods and social contexts, beginning with the rise of
landscape photography, scientific representations of nature, and “fictional” wildlife films;
extending through the development of canonical environmental media works in the 1960s; and
ending with the role of contemporary interactive and “recycling” based aesthetics.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
After completing this course, students will be able to effectively:
• Identify the unique contributions of different media forms to the representation and
engagement of environmental issues.
• Compare the applicability of existing methodologies and critical frameworks for various
aspects of environmental media production, distribution, and consumption.
• Evaluate the effects of environmental media texts and aesthetic approaches.
• Analyze the human and natural environment in terms of the politics of space, labor,
economy, waste, etc.
REQUIRED TEXTS
Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985).
ASSIGNMENTS
Participation will be based on attendance, diligent reading, and active participation in all class
discussions. Students will be responsible for writing two papers that analyze a particular
environmental media formation using the analytics offered in the course. Detailed instructions
will be provided to students in class for these assignments.
Evaluation
Participation: 20%
Midterm paper: 30%
Final paper: 50%
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Evaluation Rubric
A= Excellent
This work is comprehensive and detailed, integrating themes and concepts from discussions,
lectures and readings. Writing is clear, analytical and organized. Arguments offer specific
examples and concisely evaluate evidence. Students who earn this grade are prepared for class,
synthesize course materials and contribute insightfully.
B=Good
This work is complete and accurate, offering insights at general level of understanding. Writing
is clear, uses examples properly and tends toward broad analysis. Classroom participation is
consistent and thoughtful.
C=Average
This work is correct but is largely descriptive, lacking analysis. Writing is vague and at times
tangential. Arguments are unorganized, without specific examples or analysis. Classroom
participation is inarticulate.
D= Unsatisfactory
This work is incomplete, and evidences little understanding of the readings or discussions.
Arguments demonstrate inattention to detail, misunderstand course material and overlook
significant themes. Classroom participation is spotty, unprepared and off topic.
F=Failed
This grade indicates a failure to participate and/or incomplete assignments
A = 94-100
A- = 90-93
B+ = 87-89
B = 84-86
B- = 80-83
C+ = 77-79
C = 74-76
C- = 70-73
D+ = 65-69
D = 60-64
F = 0-59
COURSE POLICIES
Absences and Lateness
Attendance is mandatory. More than two unexcused absences will automatically result in a lower
grade. Chronic lateness will also be reflected in your evaluation of participation. Regardless of
the reason for your absence you will be responsible for any missed work.
Format
Please type and double-space written work. Typing improves the clarity and readability of your
work and double-spacing allows room for me to comment. Please also number and staple
multiple pages. You are free to use your preferred citation style. Please use it consistently
throughout your writing. If sending a document electronically, please name the file in the
following format Yourlastname Coursenumber Assignment1.doc
Grade Appeals
Please allow two days to pass before you submit a grade appeal. This gives you time to reflect
on my assessment. If you still want to appeal your grade, please submit a short but considered
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paragraph detailing your concerns. Based on this paragraph, I will review the question and either
augment your grade or refine my explanation for the lost points.
General Decorum
Slipping in late or leaving early, sleeping, text messaging, surfing the Internet, doing homework,
eating, etc. are distracting and disrespectful to all participants in the course.
Academic Dishonesty and Plagiarism (http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity)
The relationship between students and faculty is the keystone of the educational experience at
New York University in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
This relationship takes an honor code for granted and mutual trust, respect, and responsibility as
foundational requirements. Thus, how you learn is as important as what you learn. A university
education aims not only to produce high-quality scholars, but to also cultivate honorable citizens.
Academic integrity is the guiding principle for all that you do, from taking exams to making oral
presentations to writing term papers. It requires that you recognize and acknowledge information
derived from others and take credit only for ideas and work that are yours.
You violate the principle of academic integrity when you
• cheat on an exam,
• submit the same work for two different courses without prior permission from your
professors,
• receive help on a take home examination that calls for independent work, or
• plagiarize.
Plagiarism, one of the gravest forms of academic dishonesty in university life, whether intended
or not, is academic fraud. In a community of scholars, whose members are teaching, learning,
and discovering knowledge, plagiarism cannot be tolerated. Plagiarism is failure to properly
assign authorship to a paper, a document, an oral presentation, a musical score, and/or other
materials that are not your original work. You plagiarize when, without proper attribution, you
do any of the following:
• copy verbatim from a book, an article, or other media;
• download documents from the Internet;
• purchase documents;
• report from other’s oral work;
• paraphrase or restate someone else’s facts, analysis, and/or conclusions; or
• copy directly from a classmate or allow a classmate to copy from you.
Your professors are responsible for helping you to understand other people’s ideas, to use
resources and conscientiously acknowledge them, and to develop and clarify your own thinking.
You should know what constitutes good and honest scholarship, style guide preferences, and
formats for assignments for each of your courses. Consult your professors for help with problems
related to fulfilling course assignments, including questions related to attribution of sources.
Through reading, writing, and discussion, you will undoubtedly acquire ideas from others, and
exchange ideas and opinions with others, including your classmates and professors. You will be
expected, and often required, to build your own work on that of other people. In so doing, you
are expected to credit those sources that have contributed to the development of your ideas.
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Avoiding Academic Dishonesty
• Organize your time appropriately to avoid undue pressure, and acquire good study habits,
including note taking.
• Learn proper forms of citation. Always check with your professors of record for their
preferred style guides. Directly copied material must always be in quotes; paraphrased
material must be acknowledged; even ideas and organization derived from your own
previous work or another's work need to be acknowledged.
• Always proofread your finished work to be sure that quotation marks, footnotes and other
references were not inadvertently omitted. Know the source of each citation.
• Do not submit the same work for more than one class without first obtaining the
permission of both professors even if you believe that work you have already completed
satisfies the requirements of another assignment.
• Save your notes and drafts of your papers as evidence of your original work.
Disciplinary Sanctions
If a professor suspects cheating, plagiarism, or other forms of academic dishonesty, appropriate
disciplinary action may be taken following the department procedure or through referral to the
Committee on Student Discipline. The Steinhardt School Statement on Academic Integrity is
consistent with the NYU Policy on Student Conduct, published in the NYU Student Guide.
STUDENT RESOURCES
• Students with physical or learning disabilities are required to register with the Moses
Center for Students with Disabilities, 726 Broadway, 2nd Floor, (212-998-4980) and are
required to present a letter from the Center to the instructor at the start of the semester in
order to be considered for appropriate accommodation.
• Writing Center: 411 Lafayette, 4th Floor. Schedule appts at rich15.com/nyu/ or walk-in.
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SCHEDULE OF CLASSES, READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Eco-criticism, Green Film Criticism, and Environmental Communication
Case Study: Climate Change
Reading: Lawrence Buell, “The Emergence of Environmental Criticism,” in The Future of
Environmental Criticism: Environmental Criticism and the Literary Imagination
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005): 1-28
Adrian Ivakhiv, “Green Film Criticism and its Futures,” Foreign Literature Studies 29, no. 1
(2007): 46-65.
Robert Cox, “The Field of Environmental Communication,” in Environmental Communication
and the Public Sphere (London: Sage, 2006): 14-22.
Mark Maslin, “A Brief History of the Global Warming Debate,” in Global Warming: A Very
Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 23-40.
Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination,” WIREs Clim
Change (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2011): 1-19.
Week 3: Landscape, Photography, and Power
Case Study: Industrialization
Reading: Raymond Williams, “Country and City,” in The Country and the City (New York,
Oxford University Press, 1973), 1-8.
Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the
Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 3 (2000):
241-260.
Gillian Rose, “Looking at Landscape: The Uneasy Pleasures of Power,” in Feminism and
Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993).
Doreen Massey, “Landscape as a Provocation: Reflections on Moving Mountains.” Journal of
Material Culture 11(1/2) (2006): 33-48.
Gerda Cammaer, “Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes: The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Creating Moving Still Images and Stilling Moving Images of Ecological Disasters,”
Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 121130.
Screening: Manufactured Landscapes (2006, 80 min)
Week 5: Colonization, Classification, Cinematography
Case Study: Scientific Communication
Reading: Richard Grove, “Introduction,” in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical
Island Edens and the Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996): 1-16.
Geoffrey C. Bowker & Susan Leigh Star, selections from Sorting Things Out: Classification and
its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
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Hannah Landecker, “Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film,” Isis 97 (2006):
121–132.
Hannah Rose Shell, “Things Under Water: Etienne-Jules Marey’s Aquarium Laboratory and
Cinema’s Assembly,” and E.J. Marey, “Locomotion in Water: As Studied Through
Photochronography,” in Digipolitik: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour
and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 326–332.
Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve, edited by Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina
McDougall, translated by Jeanine Herman: Marina Mc Dougall, “Introduction: Hybrid
Roots,” Andre Bazin “Science Film: Accidental Beauty,” and Jean Painleve, “Scientific
Film” (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000): xiv-xvii, 144-147, 161–164.
Screenings: Proteus (2004, 60 min), Locomotion in Water (2005, 13 min)
Week 6: Nature, Ethnography, and Image-Events
Case Study: Wildlife Filmmaking and Endangered Species
Reading: Kate Soper, “The Discourses of Nature,” in What Is Nature: Culture, Politics and the
non-Human (Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 15-37.
Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Making Waves.” Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental
Activism (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999): 1-22.
David Bousé, “The Problem of Images,” Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 4-36.
Gregg Mitman, “Science versus Showmanship on the Silver Screen,” Reel Nature: America’s
Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 26-58.
Screenings: Grizzly Man (2005, 103 min); selections from The Cove (2009, 92 min).
Week 7: (News) Stories of Modern Environmentalism
Case Study: Pesticides
Reading: Rachel Carson, selections from Silent Spring (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative” Journal of American
History 78 (1992): 1347-1376.
Robert Cox, “News Production and the Environment,” Environmental Communication and the
Public Sphere (London: Sage, 2006): 172-182.
George Lakoff, “Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment,” Environmental
Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 4: 1 (2010): 70-81.
Priscilla Coit Murphy, “Media: ‘One Formidable Indictment.’” What a Book Can Do: the
Publication and Reception of Silent Spring (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2005): 119-133.
Screening: The Silent World (1956)
Week 8: Environmental Spectacle and (Post-)Apocalyptic Discourse
Case Study: Overpopulation
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Reading: Paul R. Ehrlich, selections from The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books,
1968).
Guy Debord, selections from The Society of the Spectacle. trans. K. Knabb (Detroit: Black and
Red, 1977).
Greg Garrard, “Apocalypse,” in Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004): 92-107.
Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown, “Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from
Silent Spring to Global Warming,” Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in
Contemporary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 21-35.
Lawrence Buell, “Environmental Apocalypticism,” in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau,
Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1994), 280-310.
Screening: clips from Silent Running (1971), Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973).
Week 9: Comedy, Toxicity, and Monstrous Natures
Case Study: Genetic Modification
Reading: Robert Cox, “Media Effects,” Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere
(London: Sage, 2006): 183-191.
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, “The Comic Eco-Hero: Spoofing Eco-Disaster in
Eight Legged Freaks,” in Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2009), 109-126.
Sharm Devinder, “Genetic Modification, Food and Sustainable Development: Telling the Story,”
The Daily Globe: Environmental Change, the Public, and the Media, ed. Joe Smith
(London: Earthscan, 2000): 223-237.
Stacey Alaimo, “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films,” in Beyond
Nature Writing, eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2001), 279-296.
Lawrence Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Spring 1998): 639-665.
Screening: clips from Eight Legged Freaks (1985), Toxic Avenger (1989)
Week 10: The Sounds of Environmental Melodrama
Case Study: Nuclear Meltdowns and Airborne Toxic Events
Reading: Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985)
Ulrich Beck, “The Politics of Knowledge in the Risk Society,” Risk Society: Towards a New
Modernity (London: SAGE, 1992), 51-90.
Robert Cox, “Media Reporting of Risk,” Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere
(London: Sage, 2006): 227-233
David Ingram, “Introduction: Melodrama, Realism and Environmental Crisis.” Green Screen:
Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 2004): 1-12.
Steven Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 3 (2006):
239-257.
Screening: Safe (1995, 119 min); Toxic Audio Tour, http://invisible5.org/.
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Week 11: Recycling, Video, and Environmental Justice
Case Study: Waste
Reading: Patricia Yaegar, “The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish
Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 2008).
Jennifer Gabrys, “Introduction,” in Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 1-19.
Lisa Parks, “Falling Apart: Electronics Salvaging and the Global Media Economy,” in Residual
Media, edited by Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Julie Sze, “Introduction: Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger.” Noxious New York:
The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2007), 1-17.
Screening: The Gleaners and I (2000, 82 min)
Week 12: Artificial Ecologies: Animation, Games, and Interactive Environments
Case Study: Agriculture
Reading: Alenda Y. Chang, “Back to the Virtual Farm: Gleaning the Agriculture-Management
Game.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2012): 1–16.
Michael R. Longan, “Playing with Landscape: Social Processes and Spatial Form in Video
Games.” Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 2 (2008): 23-40.
Nicole Starosielski, “Movements that are Drawn’: A History of Environmental Animation from
The Lorax to FernGully to Avatar.” International Communication Gazette.
Sean Cubitt, “Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism,” in
Ecocinema: Theory and Practice, eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubbitt
(New York: Routledge, 2012).
Screening: The Lorax (1972)
Week 13: Mediated Inequalities: Documenting Global Resource Privatization
Case Study: Food and Water Scarcity
Reading: Vandana Shiva, “Introduction: Converting Abundance into Scarcity,” in Water Wars:
Privatization, Pollution and Profit (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002).
Bill Nichols, “Documentary Modes of Representation,” Representing Reality: Issues and
Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Maria Mies, “The Myth of Catching-up Development,” in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva,
Ecofeminism (Hailfax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publications, 1993).
Steven L. Jackson, “Writing the Global Water Crisis,” Technology and Culture 49, no. 3 (July
2008).
Theodore Steinberg, “Big Is Ugly: Corporate Enclosure and the Global Water Supply,”
Technology and Culture 45, No. 3 (July 2004): 618-623.
Screening: FLOW: For Love Of Water (2008, 93 min)
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Week 14: Media’s Environments
Case Study: Oil Economies and Petroleum-based media
Reading: Charles J. Corbett and Richard P. Turco, “Film and Television,” Southern California
Environmental Report Card, UCLA Institute of the Environment (2006), 5-11, 40.
Nadia Bozak, “Introduction," The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, selections from Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
William L. Fox, Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles (Emeryville, CA:
Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007), 34-37.
Stephanie LeMenager, “Fossil, Fuel: Manifesto for the Postoil Musuem.” Journal of American
Studies 46 (May 2012): 375-394.
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