FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Drafts of all of the manuscripts below are on invitation and/or have been completed and are awaiting publication.
Visions of Sustainability: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Green City Life
That cultural narratives play a vital role in sustainability transformations is a central insight informing empirical and cognitive strands of ecocriticism, which combine social science and humanities methods to investigate the impact of such narratives. The chapter introduces these approaches and, by way of example, analyzes the narrative strategies of Manon Turina and François Marques’s eco-documentary La Belle Ville/Green City Life in light of reception data collected at a screening in Freiburg, Germany in the context of the transdisciplinary “Visions of Sustainability” project. The analysis shows how the upbeat and solution-oriented film cued emotions of hope and “a drive to action” in viewers and that watching it had a positive influence on viewers’ perceived personal efficacy in contributing to an urban sustainability culture. The results suggest not only that cultural narratives can move viewers, shift attitudes, and impact action intentions, but also that conducting research on them has itself transformative potential.
(with Thomas Heintz, for the Handbook of Cultural Sustainability, edited by Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, and Hubert Zapf. Under contract with DeGruyter)
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Envisioning a Green Future: Climate Action in Documentary Film
While much of climate cinema has tended toward dystopia and doom, this article focuses on an emerging strain of solution-oriented documentary that foregrounds messages of hope and resilience by portraying people who are engaged in climate action. It zooms in on two of these films – Kathrin Pitterling’s Aufschrei der Jugend and Luc Balthazar’s Duty of Care – combining a qualitative analysis of their narrative and visual strategies with the results of surveys that were conducted at two local screenings in Freiburg, Germany, within the framework of the inter- and transdisciplinary “Visions of Sustainability” project at the Sustainability Innovation Campus (University of Freiburg and KIT). Drawing on work in the fields of transformative research for sustainability (Horcea-Milcu et al. 2024) and empirical ecocriticism (Schneider-Mayerson et al. 2023), the article demonstrates that the two films cued hope and “a drive to action” in viewers, inspiring them to do more for climate protection in their own lives and environments.
(with Thomas Heintz, for Oxford Intersections: Climate Adaptation, section “Narratives of the Future,” edited by Adelina Johns-Putra and Kiu-wai Chu)
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Environmental Science Fiction as Feeling: The Affective Dimensions of Cognitive Estrangement
In his seminal Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Darko Suvin argues “for an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement” and for the presence of the narrative “Novum” as the element that makes science fiction “significantly different” from other types of fiction. Suvin’s claim that “cognition includes the imagination” is supported by the clinical research of neurologists such as Antonio Damasio, which shows that the human brain processes direct perception and imaginary perception in much the same way, triggering the same range of affective responses. However, in his 2014 Postscript to a reprint of his work, Suvin posits that “all of us on the planet Earth live in highly endangered times” and then goes on to suggest that the question of “what is cognition (and in particular the defining factor of SF, the Novum)” can only be answered within larger value systems. The chapter links this important observation to the recent shift in science fiction (scholarship) toward the more utopian along with the environmental “forcing” that has driven it. Second, it examines from the viewpoint of cognitive ecocriticism the affective dimensions of an ecotopian narrative Novum (Suvin 1979) that, at the current moment, appears to exist predominantly as struggle, hope, or demand. Third, it explores why it is so difficult to develop ecotopian ones given readers’ larger cognitive frames. It considers pertinent examples of environmental science fiction in literature and film.
(for The Liverpool Handbook of Environmental Science Fiction, edited by Eric Otto)
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Empirical Ecocriticism
Across various fields, claims have been made about the capacity of narrative representations of the nonhuman in literature, film, and other media to shape the perceptions of the nonhuman and related attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, it is argued that such representations may reinforce exploitative views of the environment and nonhuman species – or, conversely, promote empathy, care, and pro-environmental action. Assessing the validity of such claims requires empirical testing. Empirical ecocriticism aims to do so by using methods derived from the social sciences (correlational and experimental studies in particular) combined with theories and approaches from the humanities (such as ecocriticism and animal studies). This chapter outlines the methodology of empirical ecocriticism and demonstrates its benefits through examples of concrete studies investigating the attitudinal and behavioral influence of literary representations of the climate crisis and non-human animals. Studies concerning representations of the nonhuman in other media formats will be included for comparison.
(with W.P. Malecki and Thomas Heintz, for the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literatures of the Nonhuman, edited by Erin James and Marco Caracciolo)