Compiling and Mediating Environmental History

Undergraduate / Graduate

How do audiovisual media archives inform both the research and presentation of environmental history? Social media posts, fiction film, photographs from geological surveys, and urban field recordings all index historical environmental conditions. Artists and scholars enlist such archives to reanimate lost and changed landscapes for contemporary audiences, raising historiographical questions about how research excavates, extracts, and assembles both image and sound. This course looks at a series of documentary films and online media projects that enlist media to narrate histories of socio-ecological interaction. These projects explore site-specific environmental crises as they were deliberately or inadvertently recorded by media, including the toxic legacies of U.S. Imperialism, the extraction economy of South African apartheid, or how Hollywood films unconsciously document the long-term impacts of climate change. Students will analyze these media objects alongside readings in media historiographical theory, environmental history, and documentary theory. The goal of this engagement is to guide students toward a final project that employs both research and creative practice to compile a report about an environmental historical case study that utilizes a media archive to make the argument. This course shows how humanistic inquiry into documentary media and the material conditions of media production can inform the assembly and presentation of environmental historical knowledge.