Ecologies Of Affect

Ecologies of Affect offers a synthetic introduction to the felt dynamics of cities and the character of places. The contributors capture the significance of affects including desire, nostalgia, memory, and hope in forming the identity and tone of places. The critical intervention this collection of essays makes is an active, consistent engagement with the virtualities that produce and refract our idealized attachments to place. Contributors show how place images, and attempts to build communities, are, rather than abstractions, fundamentally tied to and revolve around such intangibles. We understand nostalgia, desire, and hope as virtual; that is, even though they are not material, they are nevertheless real and must be accounted for. In this book, the authors take up affect, emotion, and emplacement and consider them in relation to one another and how they work to produce and are produced by certain temporal and spatial dimensions. The aim of the book is to inspire readers to consider space and place beyond their material properties and attend to the imaginary places and ideals that underpin and produce material places and social spaces. This collection will be useful to practitioners and students seeking to understand the power of affect and the importance of virtualities within contemporary societies, where intangible goods have taken on an increasing value.

This book presents an ecophilosophy of cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to the lived ecologies – material, social, and perceptual relations – within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. If cinema takes us on mental and emotional journeys, the author argues that those journeys that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. A range of styles are examined, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Malick, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.

Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant and important volume imagines a more affective—and consequently more effective—ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies. These interdisciplinary essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales such as Canada’s Tar Sands. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness—all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism. Affective Ecocriticism offers an accessible approach to this theoretical intersection that will speak to readers across multiple disciplinary and geographic locations.

How do we experience the virtual environments in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others at risk? Weik von Mossner explores these questions that are important to anyone interested in the emotional, persuasive power of environmental narratives.

""Governing Affect" is a transnational comparative examination of the intersection of emotions and disaster recovery in Honduras; New Orleans; Chiapas, Mexico; and Illinois"--

In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man. The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.

Environmental rhetorics have expanded awareness of mass extinction, climate change, and pervasive pollution, yet failed to generate collective action that adequately addresses such pressing matters. This book contends that the anemic response to ecological upheaval is due, in part, to an inability to navigate novel forms of environmental guilt. Combining affect theory with rhetorical analysis to examine a range of texts and media, Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics positions guilt as a keystone emotion for contemporary environmental communication, and explores how it is provoked, perpetuated, and framed through everyday discourse. In revealing the need for emotional literacies that productively engage our complicity in global ecological harm, the book looks to a future where guilt—and its symbiotic relationships with anger, shame, and grief—is shaped in tune with the ecologies that sustain us.

Heritage Ecologies presents an ecological understanding of heritage that furthers a concern for how its making and unmaking always involves a wide range of human and other-than-human actors. Recognizing the entangled nature-cultures of heritage is essential in the Anthropocene era, where uncertainty and rapid environmental change force us to recast common conceptions of inheritance and to envision new strategies for preservation. Heritage sites are meant to be open and shared spaces, and a recurring argument in the cases presented here is that this openness inevitably also overrides our selections, orders and appreciations. Through a diverse range of case studies, the chapters collected in this book aim to explore the affects and memories engendered by diverse heritage ecologies where humans are neither the sole makers nor the only inheritors. The common call is that the experiential, perceptive and informational plenitude enabled through contributions of other-than-human actors is key to an ecological rethinking of heritage in the twenty-first century. Heritage Ecologies is unique in bringing heritage studies into closer proximity with a wide variety of non-representational and object-oriented theories and is an important volume for students and researchers in archaeology and heritage studies.