[csaa-forum] Extended deadline: special issue - Our Sentimental Natures: environmental commitments, media and feeling

[Nicole Matthews]

Extended deadline - full papers for submission by March 18, 2022


Our Sentimental Natures:

environmental commitments, media and feeling


Special issue of Continuum: journal of media and culture, to be published 2023



This special issue will examine the ways media mediates our emotional entanglements with ‘nature’. While there is a rich scholarship on film and literature, sentiment in other media engaged with, exposing or constituting environmental matters has been less fully explored. The special issue aims to broaden this discussion to consider the way photography, comics, visual art, social media and games as well as print and film, might cultivate feeling for spaces, places and environmental politics.


Feelings can occupy an ambivalent position in relation to environmental thinking. Ecologies can suffer from an excess of feeling in decision-making: picturesque or sublime landscapes are not the only ones worth saving. Aesthetic values are not necessarily aligned with ecological ones. Emotions, held strongly, can also lead to feelings of paralysis as we are overwhelmed by visions of environmental destruction. Feelings are central to much environmental communication: most campaigns are aimed at changing people’s attitudes at the level of feelings as anything else.  Such emotions have been framed in humanist terms (love of, sympathy for, empathy with ‘nature’) and posthumanist ones (affects and atmospheres, co-constitutions, becoming-with ‘nature’).


We are particularly interested in exploring the concept of sentimentality with all its resonances with hierarchies of value and gender binaries. Some feelings, and the feelings of some people, are more legitimate than others. Feelings are thought to ‘get in the way’ of objective and rational decision making, and progress. Nonetheless, as David Ingram suggests, “Sentimental attachments to the natural world are, from both an experiential and a political point-of-view, as important as scientific analyses, and are a vital part of environmental concern.”


We encourage submissions around:


  *   genealogies of sentiment and its implications for environmentalism
  *   sentimental connections to place and critiques of sentiment
  *   feeling and being country
  *   disgust and abjection in environmental media
  *   gendered media, emotion and value in environmental politics
  *   fear, rage and environmental justice
  *   the pleasures of the proprietorial colonial gaze
  *   circuits of activist media and cultivation of a feeling for place
  *   climate grief – media and the management of feeling
  *   media and the politics of care in the Anthropocene
  *   mediating human-more-than-human feelings
  *   eco-phobic narratives
  *   Cassandra’s compensation – the dubious pleasures of “I told you so”
  *   alternatives to apocalyptic tropes and story-telling
  *   beyond binaries: thinking, feeling and media forms


Papers of no more than 6000 words due for submission by March 18, 2022


Submissions will be via Continuum’s online submission process.


If you have questions or need more information contact Nicole.Matthews at mq.edu.au<mailto:Nicole.Matthews at mq.edu.au> or Ian.Collinson at mq.edu.au<mailto:Ian.Collinson at mq.edu.au> with the subject line “Our Sentimental Natures”




A/Prof Nicole Matthews

Media Communication Creative Arts Languages and Literature

Macquarie University, Sydney


Pronouns: she/her


[cid:47fa28f0-f991-44ee-a61a-d70913c8d28c].       . [cid:ac91b709-cf8d-4dc3-b69b-bac05f5be732]


Just out!


Nicole Matthews (2021) "Commodifying Diversity in the Marketing of a Digital Hearing Start-Up" Television and New Media
https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764211009601<https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764211009601>



I pay my respect to the traditional owners of Country including the traditional custodians of the land on which Macquarie University is situated, the Wattmattageal clan of the Darug nation.


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