FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Drafts of all of the manuscripts below have been completed and are awaiting publication.
A Glacial Pace? Mountain Cinema and the Imagination of Climate Change
Mountains are at once a deeply natural phenomenon—an elevated portion of the Earth’s crust—and the product of human intervention. In this chapter, focus on three documentaries – Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid (2009), Hannes Lang’s Peak (2011), and Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice (2012) – which are paradigmatic in their uses of glaciers to forward a political and ecological argument about anthropogenic climate change. I explore how each of these documentaries invites viewers to engage with the depicted mountain environments and consider the films’ reception to shed light on the relationship between pacing, emotional engagement, and the potential impact on environmental attitudes and behavior. A better understanding of how such effects are achieved is relevant not only for the analysis of global mountain cinema but also for climate change communication.
(for Global Mountain Cinema, edited by Christian Quendler, Kamaal Haque, and Caroline Schaumann. Under contract with Edinburgh University Press)
—
Sensing Imaginary Landscapes
The article explores how writers and filmmakers evoke built environments in ways that invite audiences to not only envision these places but imagine all their sensual dimensions. Bringing together insights from neuroscience, cognitive econarratology, and utopian studies – and focusing predominantly on the evocation of urban landscapes – it highlights the central role of the mirror neuron system and a process that neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese has called “embodied simulation” in the creation of narrative presence. It argues that a better understanding of multisensory imagery and imagined perception is relevant for landscape architects who create, and then communicate, their own visions of future environmental designs.
(Invited contribution for a special issue on SENSE of the journal LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal on Landscape Architecture, edited by Karen M’Closkey)
—