Toxic Media Ecologies

This edited collection explores strategies of critique for responding to what many commentators now refer to as our current poly-crises.

Today, economic, political, cultural, social, environmental, and personal crises increasingly collapse together into situations of toxic shock which intensify repression and process lives into toxic waste. Drawing on the expansive understanding of mediation in the Canadian communication tradition deriving from Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan and on eco-criticism of media environments, Toxic Media Ecologies foregrounds the objective subjectiveness of crises and considers how we as subjects are connected to each other through crises. Critical essays presented in Part I interrogate topics ranging from money and feminist science fiction to the online Alt-Right and racism. Parts II and III present theoretical reflections on research-creation engagements with pedagogies, ecology and poetry, as well as design, care-work, performance art and pedagogical games. Overall, this volume elaborates on the thesis that ecological crises are fundamentally historical, political, and cultural and presents a novel juxtaposition and comparison between cultural studies and research-creation critical approaches.

Innovative and transdisciplinary in its approach, Toxic Media Ecologies will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication and media, environmental humanities, environmental justice, political ecology and media studies.