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- Volume 1, Issue Supplement 1, 2020
Journal of Environmental Media - Volume 1, Issue s1, 2020
Volume 1, Issue s1, 2020
- Articles
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Screened screens screening: Boundaries and boundary-drawing practices during COVID-19
By Liu XinThis short piece concerns the figure of the screen as a boundary object and screening as a boundary-drawing practice during COVID-19. The screen is understood of as a surface that filters, shields, protects, conceals, mediates, intrudes and on which images can be projected and made visible. This text links together and thinks through various instantiations of the figure of the screen, such as digital screens and face masks. In so doing, it makes visible the ways in which the digital, affective and embodied screens and screening practices shape the perception of and response to COVID-19 in various contexts, as well as the multiple and often contradictory ways in which boundaries of spaces and bodies are materialized and undone.
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Online environmental news stories in India during the COVID-19 pandemic: Reporting the ‘crisis’ and ‘concerns’ of the natural ecosystem
More LessThis article is a review of the online news reports about the ‘humanitarian crisis’ that surfaced in India as thousands of migrant workers struggled to return home during the nationwide lockdown triggered by COVID-19. With several newspaper editions unable to print and circulate amid lockdown, the online news portals and mobile news apps served as significant news dissemination platforms to the people. The article also attempts to understand how the online news portals reported the environmental issues in relation to the countrywide lockdown. On the one hand, the news stories traced the origin of COVID-19 with coronavirus transmitting to humans via other species like bats and pangolins; on the other, many reports drew people’s attention to the improvement in air quality with declining pollution levels due to the shutdown. Besides, a number of news reports surfaced that warned about the water crisis looming large in many water-stressed regions of India with the onset of summer as more water would be required for sanitization to keep the deadly virus at bay.
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‘Nature is healing’: Environmental infodemic and the pitfall of dualism
More LessAs the pandemic of COVID-19 shut down the world and people were ordered to stay home and social distance from each other, the world turned to social media to share all sorts of information about the pandemic and related topics, giving rise to infodemic or ‘an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it’ (WHO 2020: 2). Besides the overwhelming amount of information about the virus and its treatment, COVID-19 infodemic includes a copious volume of information about the environment. Many of the stories that spread on social media reported improvements to the environment, and this was attributed to human absence. This article will reflect on these stories and their implications from an ecological perspective with several questions in mind: how is the environment constructed in social media in relation to the pandemic, and what are their implications?; what may be overlooked in the infodemic on the environment, and why does that matter? My reflection addresses and problematizes the prevalence of dualism in the ways the environment is constructed in the widespread environmental stories in the context of the pandemic.
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‘So long, and thanks for all the fish!’: Urban dolphins as ecofascist fake news during COVID-19
More LessAt the time of COVID-19 social distancing, the move from the real to a digital public life has propagated viral videos of ‘capturing’ wild animals performing unusual behaviours in typically urban habitats. From Welsh sheep using roundabouts to dolphins swimming in the Venice canals, the real from the fake becomes difficult to discern through technological advances but also in the belief in the underlying ideological environmental message it enables. In this article, I examine how these viral videos are not only being faked for the social validation of likes and retweets but have also become a tool for ecofascism: a far-right ideology that marries environmentalism with white supremacist ethnonationalism. I examine how social media is used to implicitly spread ecofascist ideas through an environmentalism fakery such as the urban Venetian dolphin that shows how humans, not COVID-19, are the virus and how these human-less vignettes are ultimately used by ecofascists to argue against immigration in order to ‘bring nature back to the natural order of things’. In conclusion, I look at what the initial implications are for communication and environmentalism and the potential these human-less lockdowns have for making convincing arguments for even the smallest of societal changes to mitigate climate change.
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Abandoned aquariums: Online animal attractions during quarantine
More LessIn this article, I argue that popular online animal videos during the coronavirus pandemic are emblematic of the political stakes of animal documentary in the era of climate change. Conceived in response to James Leo Cahill’s ‘A YouTube bestiary: Twenty-six theses on a post-cinema of animal attractions’, I claim a broad public is currently navigating its hopes and fears over an oncoming posthuman future through differing deployments of what Cahill calls the ‘animal attractions’ of online videos. Comparing several recent examples, I analyse these images as documents of an era defined by interactions between humans and nonhumans (such as zoonotic diseases like COVID-19) and as fabulist visions of a future without human beings. Here, emptied aquariums embody the concerns of our current historical moment, evoking anxieties over environmental degradation and speculation about our unknown future.
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Quarantine encounters with digital animals: More-than-human geographies of lockdown life
Authors: Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle and William M. AdamsQuarantine conditions led to the proliferation of digital encounters with nonhuman animals. Here, we explore three prominent forms: creaturely cameos, avatar acquaintances and background birding. These virtual encounters afforded during lockdown life generated novel and affective human–animal relations that could have lasting effects for humans and nonhumans post-quarantine, posing interesting questions for more-than-human scholarship.
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Futuristic media: A temporal reflection and eternal platform capitalism
By Xuefei CaoDigital media is not a remedy for excessive consumption and environmental damage; the seemingly reduced impacts on the environment by the pandemic are on the ground of accelerating other modes of consumption, resource exploitation and capitalist investments. In this article, I would take China for a case to reveal the ephemeral ecology and the perpetual consumption on digital platforms in a singular future.
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The cost of labour and energy in digital media and automation technologies beyond the COVID-19 pandemic
More LessThe worldwide spread of COVID-19 accelerates the proliferation and reliance on automated, smart and digital technologies. Calls for digitally mediated assistance to contain the crisis itself coincide with broader changes to the ways that we live, learn and work with new platforms, screens and gadgets. From essential work robots to contact tracing apps to COVID-19 artificial intelligence challenges to virtual workplaces and classrooms, the key domains of the digital age are evidently thriving in the present moment. The technoscientific optimism and solutionism of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution converge with reports about recovering ecosystems and revived urban, exurban and nonurban environments. This article cautions against an overly extenuating view of smart robotics, digital apps and online media platforms as means to effectively control the pandemic and mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Instead, policy approaches need to be informed by an extended understanding of labour relations and research on the environmental costs of various automation technologies and digital economies. To help steer post-coronavirus politics towards objectives of socio-economic and environmental justice, critical scholarship needs to address the practices and discursive strategies that continue historical legacies of extractivism and concealment.
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The extractive infrastructures of contact tracing apps
Authors: Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke SneltingThe COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a major crisis, with calls for debt moratoriums that are expected to have gruesome effects in the Global South. Another tale of this crisis that would come to dominate COVID-19 news across the world was a new technological application: the contact tracing apps. In this article, we argue that both accounts – economic implications for the Global South and the ideology of techno-solutionism – are closely related. We map the phenomenon of the tracing app onto past and present wealth accumulations. To understand these exploitative realities, we focus on the implications of contact tracing apps and their relation with extractive technologies as we build on the notion racial capitalism. By presenting themselves in isolation of capitalism and extractivism, contact tracing apps hide raw realities, concealing the supply chains that allow the production of these technologies and the exploitative conditions of labour that make their computational magic manifest itself. As a result of this artificial separation, the technological solutionism of contract tracing apps is ultimately presented as a moral choice between life and death. We regard our work as requiring continuous undoing – a necessary but unfinished formal dismantling of colonial structures through decolonial resistance.
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Disease, disaster and the internet: Reconceptualizing environmental hazards in the time of coronavirus
More LessThe internet is made from a vast physical system of cables that stretch unseen across prairies, mountains, oceans, under streets and within buildings. Our online information rapidly flows through this global lattice of equipment every time we send e-mails, play online games, stream Netflix or teleconference with co-workers. With a global society that has recently shifted to living, working and entertaining almost entirely online – to the point of pushing our internet’s capacity to its brink – it is worth considering the threat of disease to an industry that has traditionally prepared for a different set of environmental risks. Disasters such as earthquakes, tsunami, power outages and fishermen’s anchors have long been considered the leading environmental threats to the internet. But what about a pandemic? This article builds on a visit I took to a Seattle data centre in March 2020, when the city was beginning to go on coronavirus lockdown. As I toured the data centre’s earthquake-preparedness equipment, back-up batteries and servers sheltered within protective cages, I could not help but consider if the internet, and the thousands of employees who keep it in operation, were equipped to handle this type of ecological invader?
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Sensing the deathscape: Digital media and death during COVID-19
More LessAcross cultures, death has traditionally encompassed diverse material and ritual assemblages. Funeral practices are a unifying element of death, presenting an opportunity for communal memorialization of the deceased. These practices are environmentally embedded, spanning traditional graveyards and floral memorials, to contemporary green burials and body farms. However, COVID-19 has disrupted socio-environmental practices, due to disease transmission concerns that have manifested new constraints to funerary space. Here, I contemplate the digital deathscape during COVID-19 through three vignettes: the first considers Hart Island mass-burial drone footage and the emergence of a necropticon. The second vignette considers the emergence of domestic deathscapes and their significance to digitally broadcast (DB) funerals. The third vignette, Billy’s funeral, gives interview-based insights into the porous domestic deathscape of a DB funeral guest, Samantha. All three vignettes contemplate the experience of remotely sensing the deathscape and the scenarios that arise when traditionally hidden or ‘in-place’ death rituals arise ‘out-of-place’.
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#NoGoingBack: Queer leaps at the intersection of protest and COVID-19
More LessThe concurrency of quarantine and protest has highlighted the trappings of a modernist realism whose conservative solutions reveal a paucity of methods and dreams. The wins that the uprisings against anti-Black police violence have put on the horizon, from the dismantling of carceral institutions to the uplifting of alternatives, have been long seeded by social movements that demanded the impossible. This includes ancestors, many of whom Black, queer and abolitionist, who prepared to take fantastic leaps, in the words of the Combahee River Collective. The following meditation holds up this legacy in order to reckon with the racism accompanying this latest crisis, from the Orientalist origin story of the coronavirus to a global quarantine paradigm that is haunted by racial capitalism. At the dystopic crossroad of the pandemic and the uprisings, a multiracial and multi-species spectre of planetary interdependence appears. This is illustrated by a mutual aid movement that uses digital and offline tactics in order to norm beyond the normal. In the place of a state-led surveillance and a single-issue environmentalism that are hostile to those most vulnerable to the virus, an urban environmental justice becomes palpable whose methods are queer.
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Pandemic temporalities: Distal futurity in the digital Capitalocene
By Nadine ChanThis article situates the cultural significance of COVID-19 at the intersection of critical conversation around capitalism, the digital and the environmental – fields where time and temporality are key elements to understanding what it means to imagine futures in an unequal, uncertain and alienated world. It argues that the exponential proliferation of digital lifeworlds during COVID-19 is symptomatic of deeper disjunctive temporalities symptomatic of late-stage capitalism. This article further considers if ‘pandemic temporality’, experienced through rapidly expanding virtual worlds (or digital Capitalocenes), takes us further away from becoming contemporaneous with inhabited ecological time. It also examines how the very asynchronicities of digital lifeworlds may show us possible alternatives to capitalist temporalities through contemporaneous and collective activism.
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- Editorial
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