September 1, 2020

RMIT University, Melbourne

Deadline: August 14, 2020

Unless it is 100% safe to return to RMIT, this symposium will be held online. Even if we return to campus, those who aren’t able to present in-person are welcome to join us remotely.

The Screen & Sound Cultures Research Group and the Critical Intimacies Reading Group at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, present eco_media II: Fire & Rain

The first eco_media symposium was held at RMIT University in October 2019. Theorists, poets, researchers, filmmakers, recorders, and artists gathered to explore what it means to think and make in a time of climate catastrophe. See a summary of the day, along with the programme, at this page on the Screen & Sound Cultures website.

The second symposium invites a similarly broad range of thinkers and makers to take the conversation further. In particular, we seek theoretical, empirical, philosophical or creative responses to the extreme weather events that have wreaked havoc all over Australia in the last six months: the devastating bushfires that engulfed Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, and the extreme flooding events along the eastern seaboard in late January and early February 2020. Media responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will doubtless be covered by other conferences, journals and institutions. However, we also welcome discussion of how our ideas, understandings, philosophies of climate change – as well as the response to the bushfires and flooding – have been affected by the pandemic.

Academics and postgraduate researchers from humanities, communications, social sciences, media studies, environmental studies, and more, are invited to contribute.

Topics to be covered can include -- but are not limited to:

- analyses/discussion of media representations of these extreme events, or environmental issues in general

- documentary/creative interventions into the climate catastrophe discourse

- social media-based responses to the bushfires, including international

celebrity attention

-new media and environmental justice

-discussion of (or contributions to) media responses (or lack thereof) to the impact of the bushfires/floods on animal life and Indigenous Australians and Country

-how the climate debate – or responses to extreme Australian weather events – has been affected by COVID-19

-the meeting places between the natural and the mediated

-the impacts of media practice/research on the environment

-media materialism (which can incorporate elements of the above)

Presentations have a max duration of 20 mins (you will be timed), but within that 20 mins you can read or present a paper; screen or present work-in-progress; philosophise on the current media/environmental condition; live riff/performance along a theme; or any combo of these.

Selected presentations concerning visual media will be invited for conversion into articles for a special issue of Senses of Cinema planned for publication in 2021.

Please send a 200-word abstract and 50-word bio to eco.media2.rmit@gmail.com by 5pm Friday 14 August.