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  4. Área de Especialização em Cultura Contemporânea e Novas Tecnologias
  5. Political and Cultural Ecology

Political and Cultural Ecology

Objectives

  1.  To Introduce topics within the scope of cultural and political studies, namely related to the impacts of the Anthropocene, the southern and decolonial epistemologies and to the approaches to intersectionality;
  2. To understand the transversal issue of sustainability, in its relationship with general ecology issues, but also social sustainability and political and media ecology;
  3. To deep the connection of these issues with the impacts of new information and data capture technologies in the context of digital democracies;
  4. To map the problematic balance between the materiality of digital culture and a program within the scope of media ecology for a sustainable transition;
  5. To acquire research methodologies that promote the autonomy and development of critical thinking, namely crossing archaeologies, genealogies and epistemologies of the media and new qualitative tools for network analysis.

General characterization

Code

02107643

Credits

10.0

Responsible teacher

Teresa Regina Madeira de Castro

Hours

Weekly - 3

Total - 280

Teaching language

Portuguese

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

  • Azoulay, A. A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso;
  • Bonneuil, Ch. and Baptiste-Fressoz, J. (2016). The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso Books;
  • Coupe, L. (Ed.) (2000). The Green Studies Reader. From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Routledge;
  • Mitchell, W. J. T. (Ed.) (2002). Landscape and Power (2nd ed.). UCP;
  • Cubitt, S. (2016). Finite Media. Duke University Press;
  • Kilomba, G. (2019). Memórias da Plantação. Episódios de racismo quotidiano. Orfeu Negro;
  • Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press;
  • Mbembe, A. (2014). Crítica da razão negra. Antígona;
  • Parikka, J. (2015). A Geology of Media. Vol. 46. University of Minnesota Press;
  • Postman, N. (2013) "What is Media Ecology?". Media Ecology Association;
  • Santos, B. de S., & Meneses, M. P. (eds.) (2020). Knowledges Born in the Struggle. Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South. Routledge;
  • Strate, L. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition. Peter Lang Editions;
  • Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs.

Teaching method

Theoretical exposition of contents and problems supported by the active and critical participation of students.

Evaluation method

Continuous Assessment - A research paper(50%), Theoretical exposition of contents and problems supported by the active and critical participation of students(50%)

Subject matter

Today's societies are marked by the fundamental problem of sustainability, whether in terms of the climate crisis and of the Anthropocene phenomena, or in terms of the accelerated transformation of their living conditions. Globalization, ethno-social hyper-diversity - not always recognized - and the injunction between capitalism and information technologies, determine conditions of great complexity and disruption, due to diverse geo-political histories, now in disaggregation. In this topic, particular attention will be given to post-colonial European contexts, and to the processes of de-archiving and remediation of memory that threaten political and cultural cohesion. In this context, the debate surrounding reparation actions is highlighted, and how they have, in some cases, guided policies for the public circulation and exhibition of colonial documents, both texts, images, and sounds.

Therefore, it will also seek to understand the new medial and informational ecology on a planetary scale and its political implications, namely in terms of new forms of government in the world, based on digital networks, on dating and data mining, on surveillance and control algorithms, in regimes of transparency (perversely ambivalent) and capture of subjects.

It discusses the Geology of the Media in the contemporary ecological context and the global extraction of natural resources necessary for the apparent immateriality of screens and the ubiquity of networks.

Recognizing, therefore, the Ecology of Media, as a set of representations and materialities, and the reorientation of the uses of media, as a contribution to a Political Ecology in contemporary challenges.