Green Visual & Cultural Studies 



Over the past two decades, 'green' or 'ecocritical' approaches have begun to infiltrate -- and, for some, to reshape -- traditional modes of cultural theory and critique. Ecocritical literary studies,  "green" cultural studies, ecomedia studies, environmental communication, ecocomposition and ecopoetics, ecomusicology, and other subfields are contributing to a burgeoning movement of "environmental humanities" (and "environmental arts"). Much of my teaching, advising, and writing has been somewhere within this spectrum.

Some of my publications in these areas include the following:



Moving images take us on mental and emotional journeys, over the course of which we and our worlds become different. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images move viewers in ways that reshape our understanding of ourselves, of life, and of the Earth and universe.

This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries to westerns and road movies, and from sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage as well as YouTube’s expanding audiovisual universe.

Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers such as Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media.

Read the Preface here.

Reviews:

“Ecologies of the Moving Image is an ambitious book, and a capacious and satisfying one. In addressing ‘the wild phantasmagoria of images’ among which we live today, Ivakhiv gives us an account that is at once systematic and brimming with rich detail. Moving-image forms both render imaginative worlds to us and help to constitute the world we live in; this book gives us a brilliant process-relational account of both of these dimensions of media experience.”

— Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

“Ivakhiv, a leading light in the emerging eco-critical film studies, wraps two themes around each other, the cinema of and as ecology. His concern is with how cinema produces worlds, lives, and human subjects intricately implicated in the processes of Earth. Marrying Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze with eco-philosophy, Ivakhiv gives us a rich, eloquent, wide-ranging, and moving account of movement: as world, as cinema, and as hope.”

— Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London