Greenwashing Culture

Greenwashing Culture examines the complicity of culture with our environmental crisis. Through its own carbon footprint, the promotion of image-friendly environmental credentials for celebrities, and the mutually beneficial engagement with big industry polluters, Toby Miller argues that culture has become an enabler of environmental criminals to win over local, national, and international communities. Topics include: the environmental liabilities involved in digital and print technologies used by cultural institutions and their consumers; Hollywood's 'green celebrities' and the immense ecological impact of their jet-setting lifestyles and filmmaking itself; high profile sponsorship deals between museums and oil and gas companies, such as BP's sponsorship of Tate Britain; radical environmental reform, via citizenship and public policy, illustrated by the actions of Greenpeace against Shell's sponsorship of Lego. This is a thought-provoking introduction to the harmful impact of greenwashing. It is essential reading for students of cultural studies and environmental studies, and those with an interest in environmental activism.

Professional sports promote their green credentials and yet remain complicit in our global environmental crisis Sports are responsible for significant carbon footprints through stadium construction and energy use, player and spectator travel, and media coverage. The impact of sports on climate change is further compounded by sponsorship deals with the gas and petroleum industries—imbuing those extractive corporations with a positive image by embedding them within the everyday pleasure of sport. Toby Miller argues that such activities amount to "greenwashing". Scrutinizing motor racing, association football, and the Olympics, Miller weighs up their environmental policies, their rhetoric of conservation and sustainability, and their green credentials. The book concludes with the role of green citizenship and organic fan activism in promoting pro-environmental sports. This is a must-read for students and researchers in media, communications, sociology, cultural studies, and environmental studies.

Making Culture provides an in-depth discussion of Australia’s relationship between the building of national cultural identity – or ‘nationing’ – and the country’s cultural production and consumption. With the 1994 national cultural policy Creative Nation as a starting point for many of the essays included in this collection, the book investigates transformations within Australia’s various cultural fields, exploring the implications of nationing and the gradual movement away from it. Underlying these analyses are the key questions and contradictions confronting any modern nation-state that seeks to develop and defend a national culture while embracing the transnational and the global. Including topics such as publishing, sport, music, tourism, art, Indigeneity, television, heritage and the influence of digital technology and output, Making Culture is an essential volume for students and scholars within Australian and Cultural studies.

This edited volume seeks to combine and highlight the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching by exploring and reflecting on the ways in which Cultural Studies is taught and practiced at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, in the US and internationally. Contributors create a space where connections among Cultural Studies practitioners across generations and locations are formed. Because the alliances built by Cultural Studies practitioners in the U.S. and the global north are deeply shaped by the global south/Third World perspectives, this book extends an invitation to teachers and practitioners in and outside of the US, including those who may offer a transnational perspective on teaching and practicing Cultural Studies. This volume promises to be a trailblazing collection of first-rate essays by leading and emerging figures in the field of Cultural Studies.

Greenwashing: Foundations and Emerging Research on Corporate Sustainability and Deceptive Communication examines the understanding of greenwashing, provides a systematic review of available literature review, and reflects on theoretical approaches and research trends.

This book is an intervention into cultural studies' theoretical and methodological foundations. It addresses a crisis in conjunctural analysis: that there is no theorized method for conjunctural analysis as it pertains to recognizing a conjunctural shift or the emergence of an organic crisis. This crisis is connected to the belief that the definition of the conjuncture is ambiguous in Gramsci’s work, but using a broader range of primary, secondary, and also untranslated sources on the conjuncture, Carley demonstrates that Gramsci has decisively settled that ambiguity. Through a philological approach to Gramsci’s original texts, this book alters the debate around conjunctural analysis and offers means to reinterpret cultural studies and its relationship to its founding thinkers.

Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the popular universes across cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster fiction factory, tied up with digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmediality is so much more than global movie franchises. Different cultures around the world are now making new and often far less commercial uses of transmediality, applying this phenomenon to the needs and structures of a nation and re-thinking it in the form of cultural, political and heritage projects. This book offers an exploration of these national and cultural systems of transmediality around the world, showing how national cultures – including politics, people, heritage, traditions, leisure and so on – are informing transmediality in different countries. The book spans four continents and twelve countries, looking across the UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Estonia, USA, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, India, and Russia.

This comprehensive survey of green media and popular culture introduces the reader to the key debates and theories surrounding green interpretations of popular film, television and journalism, as well as comedy, music, animation, and computer games. With stimulating and original case studies on U2, Björk, the animated films of Disney, the computer game Journey, and more, this engaging text reveals the complicated and often contradictory relationship between the media and environmentalism. Examining the ways in which green media can influence the public's awareness of environmental issues, this innovative textbook is a critical starting point for students of Media, Film and Cultural Studies, and anyone else researching and studying in the rapidly growing field of green media and cultural studies.