Whale Wars and the Axiomatization of Image Events on the Public Screen (original) (raw)

Feral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media

2016

This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopus’s encounter with a digita...

Mediating Fish: Mediatization, Consumer Choice, and Media Morality

Probyn, Elspeth. "Mediating Fish: Mediatization, Consumer Choice, and Media Morality." In Globalized Eating Cultures, pp. 247-266. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019., 2019

From my current conceptual and empirical research on the sustainable production and consumption of fish (Probyn 2016), I explore how the politics of fish-as-food is mediated through the lens of television food programs, documentaries, and social media.

Blubbering on: representations of whale identity in literature, film, and science

2018

Representation of nonhuman animals is a complex and multifaceted subject. Through the act of representation, it is important for us to consider the impact humans have on constructing the identity of nonhuman animals. Due to the variety of ways humans engage in the act of representation, this project looks at how three representative modes (literature, film, and science) shape our understanding of whales and construct a whale’s identity in the process. The study is based on a human-animal studies framework and uses Vinciane Despret’s notion of agencement to deal with the subject of nonhuman identity.Master of Arts in Humanitie

Fish out of Water: The " Prince of Whales " Sideshow and the Environmental Humanities

From 1880 to 1882, two impresarios toured the decaying body of a dead whale throughout the United States as sideshow exhibition called the “Prince of Whales.” The dead whale show lay at the intersection of two important vectors in environmental humanities research: oceans and energy. This essay explores some of the epistemological and ontological problems posed by the whale show, demonstrating that methods and theories drawn from the history of the senses, media studies, and infrastructure studies can enrich the environmental humanities by offering new approaches to materiality and putrefaction.