Event: Critical Ecologies Workshop on Hacking the Nature Documentary, 10th November

A workshop on “hacking” the templates (and loves and lives) of nature documentary for the Post-humanities, open to all in the GeoHumanities or those interested in the relationships between critical ecology, film programming, live science / cinema / performance, curating, and collaborative thinking through media interventions as a form of GeoHumanities research.

Hacking the Nature Documentary: Critical Ecologies Workshop
Workshop organised by Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies research stream
Saturday 10 November 2018
2–5pm
Richard Hoggart Building 143


As much as we need to rescue the word ‘nature’ from itself, we also need to rescue the nature documentary from itself. This talk and workshop considers the potential for new critical collectivity in the ‘useful fictions’ of the twenty-first century nature documentary. Rather than abandoning the field for a more experimental eco-cinema, how can the work of the GeoHumanities critically inhabit existing, popular templates and their forms of global dissemination? Such media are undoubtedly connected to the production of contemporary geographical imaginations (and geo-fictions) in the Anthropocene. Yet, they are often passively consumed or chronically under-analysed. Given the power these narrations have to inform and police our own intimacies, as well as their role as trans-global environmental representatives, how can we open them up to new critical remits by hijacking their fables of love, labour, gender, environment, industry, order, ethics, desire, time, and species? How can we resist the nature documentary’s conformity in a time when we should be seeing a myriad of possibilities for geography, nature-cultures, and posthuman natures? This session includes an introduction to the rhetoric of natural history film-making and its media flows (production, curating, programming), which is then used as a frame for interdisciplinary provocation. We treat the nature documentary format not as a closed system of knowledge, but as a collaborative concept or device that can ‘broadcast’ new meanings.

This event is hosted by the Centre’s GeoHumanities Early Career Research Fellow Amy Cutler, with the Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies research stream, launched this year, which focusses on questions of global warming, environmental justice, colonial dispossession, climate migration, nuclear cultures, media geology and e-waste from an arts and humanities perspective that takes scientific research and practices seriously. They formalise connections between existing areas of research and practice by bringing together established environment-focused initiatives from across Anthropology, Art, English & Comparative Literature, Media & Communications, Sociology, and Visual Cultures/Research Architecture to develop collaborations, funding bids, and curricula. This GeoHumanities workshop is part of the Technologies, Worlds, Politics programme.