Call for Papers: Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies (Special Issue: 'Italian Ecomedia: Archaeologies, Theories, Perspectives'

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue: 'Italian Ecomedia: Archaeologies, Theories, Perspectives'

Guest editors: Alessia Cervini and Giacomo Tagliani, University of Palermo

In the last 25 years, the environmental humanities have gained a prominent position in academic research. Their core consists in providing historical, political and critical perspectives on topics traditionally pertaining to the STEM disciplines, such as extinction, species resurrection, biodiversity, rewilding, urban-wildland interfaces, land development and resource use (Hubbel and Ryan 2022), as specific questions emerging from the Anthropocene (Iovino and Opperman 2016; Emmet and Nye 2017). Reflecting on such topics from a humanities point of view means investigating their social and cultural implications (Morton 2010; Malm 2021), the narratives behind them, their political and semiotic effects and the imaginaries they elicit. It also creates beneficial interactions between established disciplinary domains such as philosophy, geography, history, literary and visual studies. Cinema and media studies are profoundly affected by this environmental turn, mainly from a thematic or a production studies perspective (Ingram 2000; Ivakhiv 2013). However, reflecting on the potentialities of images to create, broaden and develop specific aesthetic trajectories is a compelling task in understanding how the environmental question is transforming present audio-visual language and, in turn, how this very language could influence the environmental debate (Cubitt, Monani and Rust 2013).

This Special Issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies aims to foster a transdisciplinary dialogue about the different forms through which the vast domain of 'green discourse' has been tackled by Italian cinema and media from a critical–aesthetic perspective. Despite its alternate fortunes, the environmental question has a long history in national audio-visual production, beginning with the 'miracolo economico' ('economic miracle', 1958–63) as evidenced for instance by Ivens's TV film L'Italia non è un paese povero ('Italy is not a poor country') (1960). It was developed in subsequent decades in both fiction and non-fiction productions, such as Ferreri's Il seme dell'uomo (The Seed of Man) (1973), De Seta's In Calabria (1993), and Vicari's documentary Il mio paese (My Country) (2006). Recently, some important scholarly contributions have started to consistently investigate this history (Past 2019), which, however, remains to be fully explored in terms of its aesthetic, political, theoretical and critical implications.

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