FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Drafts of all of the manuscripts below have been completed and are awaiting publication.
Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice
Growing Hope takes a closer look at how nonfiction narratives of food justice can carry the promise of a better future in the face of grim realities. It brings together two kinds of food justice narratives that are rarely considered in conjunction: stories about community gardening projects and stories about vegan food justice. Although certainly not all community gardeners are vegans, and not all vegans are gardeners, the book shows that there is much common ground between these movements and that the stories told by them are worth exploring as part of a larger narrative about creating a better and more equitable future. In the United States, which is the focal point of the book, this is especially true for the stories told by and about people of color and their historically marginalized communities. Using an econarratological approach that is informed by food studies, vegan studies, environmental justice ecocriticism, and transmedia narratology, Growing Hope explores a selection of narratives about people who fight against this structural injustice and the racist ideologies sustaining it: stories about defiant gardening and culinary self-empowerment across a variety of media ranging from personal reflections, critical essays, autobiographies, and cookbooks to blogs, YouTube videos, and documentary films.
PART I – “GROW: Visions of Defiant Gardening” – looks at community garden projects within and beyond the city through the lenses of documentaries such as Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden (2008), Todd Darling’s Occupy the Farm (2014), and Mark MacInnis’s Urban Roots (2011), along with the transmedia storytelling of farmer-activists such as Leah Penniman. PART II “EAT: Narratives of Vegan Food Justice”– explores narratives that reject the notion that veganism is a diet or lifestyle that is inherently white and elitist. Using frameworks of intersectionality and decolonization, films like Jasmine Leyva’s The Invisible Vegan (2019) and the transmedia worlds of Black vegan food bloggers and activist chefs such as Bryant Terry reimagine it as a hopeful way toward personal and community empowerment and a path toward food justice beyond the human.
(Under contract for the Cambridge Elements in the Environmental Humanities series edited by Louise Westling, Serenella Iovino, and Timo Maran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
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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)
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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)
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Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire and Solarpunk
Solarpunk’s commitment to the creation of hopeful and desirable futures is urgently needed at a time when people are growing tired of the never-ending list of bad news. Its dynamic of realist audacity and radical hope makes it fascinating to explore, but the article explores the importance of a third emotional state – utopian desire – that is rarely mentioned explicitly but no less pervasive. In Ruth Levitas’s influential definition, utopia is “an expression of desire for a different way of living and being.” The article argues that solarpunk is suffused and propelled by that desire not only in its manifold speculative storyworlds but also in its insistence on collective transformative action.
(Lead article in a Critical Forum on “Solarpunk” in Utopian Studies)
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Envisioning Intergenerational Justice: Hope, Despair, and Transformative Action in Climate Change Films
The chapter explore the narrative strategies of two climate change documentaries in terms of their investment in critical hope and the “courage of despair” as drivers of transformative action. Jim Rakete’s Now (2021) and Dave Davis and Mary Grandelis’s Being the Change (2018). It situates the two documentaries within the larger historical context of climate activism and analyzes their perspectives on hope, despair, and transformative action as voiced by their protagonists and expressed in the filmmakers’ narrative choices. It demonstrates that both documentaries aim to engage viewers in ways that leaves them inspired rather than angry or overwhelmed, but that they envision the path to intergenerational justice in different ways.
(for Cinema of/for the Anthropocene Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship, edited by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Andrea Ruthven, forthcoming in December 2024 from Routledge)