At the Intersections of Ecosee and Just Sustainability: New Directions for Communication Theory and Practice

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Notes

1. Though the term is recently coined, its broad purview provides a useful shorthand for research in this area. For the rest of the article we adopt this shorthand.

2. The injustices associated with climate change policies are an often-referenced case in point for such complexities.

3. Since his ISLE article, Ivakhiv has further developed his theoretical system of “ecologies.”

A paper is currently in print but a version of his ideas can be found on his blog, Immanence at http://aivakhiv.blog.uvm.edu/2010/03/the_outer_space_of_cinema.html.

4. There are a handful of articles that also explicitly address these concerns. Amongst them are Andrew Light's “Boyz in the woods” (1999); Arlene Plevin's “Home everywhere and the injured body of the world: The Subversive humor of Blue Vinyl” (2004). It is worth mentioning one other reference, which while not primarily focused on images pays attention to issues of space, and consequently spatial justice. Ursula Heise's Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2007) draws from literary postcolonial and cosmopolitan theories to social science theories of risk societies to demonstrate how contemporary texts should frame issues of environmental concern at local and global scales. In drawing attention to the scales of environmental issues, Heise references both written and visual texts, in effect, enacting an interdisciplinary analysis that we advocate in our call to join ecosee and just sustainability scholarship.

5. The phrasing references John Berger's seminal Ways of Seeing (1972). Berger was one of the eartiest scholars to engage a type of “ecosee”, specifically in his Why Look at Animals? published in About Looking (1980).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salma Monani

Salma Monani is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. As lead editor, Salma Monani wrote the Introduction, while co-editors Carlo Arreglo and Belinda Chiu co-wrote the Praxis section on the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. All editors were instrumental in soliciting and reviewing all work submitted to this special issue