Journal of Environmental Media - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2025

Digital screen cultures play a fundamental role in shaping ways of thinking about the environment. Yet, digital media are highly problematic not just for the massive footprint of technological development, server maintenance, e-waste and the reproduction of the colonial extractive relationship but also for an increasing web architecture monopolized by the big-tech platforms in content creation. Nonetheless, several scholarly and activist digital practices are creatively dealing with the urgency posed by the environmental crisis, showing massive potential in challenging anthropocentric global ecoculture. Through a discourse theoretical approach to digital communication, this article offers an interpretation of selected experiences of digital communication practices as counter-hegemonic tactical communication that dislocates anthropocentric ideologies shrouded in the web informational overload. Through a narrative of the construction of one of these digital experiences, the Environmental Ideologies Map (EIDmap) website, the article discusses and calls for the multiplication of creative art-based research practices able to dislocate dominant environmental ideologies circulating in the ‘extinction internet’.

This article is a meditation on the relations between praxis, art and posthumanism. Particularly, it is an attempt at a kind of practice of meaning-making that entangles multiple theoretical fields with my own critical creative practice. The article utilizes the feminist methodology of diffraction to read multiple frameworks through each other without privileging one over the other. It explores a speculative potential in relation to meaning-making and utilizes three specific examples of my artworks that examine what it means to practise concepts that perform change. These artworks – and the theoretical orientations I argue for – take a posthumanist view of media, crude oil, water and sheep. I call this work ‘Heliotechnics/Heliotechniques’: solar practices. These include my recent work Carbon Loops (2022), a dual 16-mm projection installation of crude oil film loops that were soaked in crude oil for one month; and a revisiting of the experimental videos Signal Works (2017) and grass wool signal scan (2016). I build a kind of relation to posthumanist practices through the feminist philosopher River (Karen) Barad. While I emphasize the artworks, it is the kinds of non-representational practices and concepts that I explore in this meditation. My goal is to think through words and doings to enact concepts that perform change.

This cross-national study draws from the GPDS framework to explore the outreach strategies of two environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) – one in Ohio, United States, and the other in Paraná, Brazil. The study examined and compared ENGOs’ targeted communication practices and their efforts to engage with racial/ethnic and socio-economic minorities within charged political climates. Semi-structured qualitative interview results with ENGO employees and board members show similarities in public outreach strategies, challenges operating in politically charged environments and intentions to address the needs of low socio-economic and minority members of local communities. Many of the communication strategies described as being used by participants correspond to the social marketing theory (SMT) framework. However, ENGO employees reported low levels of confidence in effectively engaging their audience, mostly due to lack of strategic communication training and resources.

Review of: Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor, Lisa Yin Han (2024)

Minneapolis, MN and London: Minnesota University Press, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-51791-594-0, p/bk, $27.00

Review of: Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, James Morton Turner (2022)

Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-29575-218-1, p/bk, $24.95

Digital Energetics, Anne Pasek, Cindy Kaiying Lin, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper and Jordan B. Kinder (2023)

Minneapolis, MN and Chicago, IL: University of Minnesota Press and Meson Press, 130 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-45296-986-2, p/bk, $18.00