Confronting the Climate Crisis - (Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication) by Daniel Binns & Rebecca Najdowski (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This collection examines how activism, media, and creative practices shape our understanding of the climate crisis. Bringing together perspectives from media studies, environmental humanities, and artistic research, Confronting the Climate Crisis: Activism, Technology and Ecoaesthetics explores how digital technologies, protest movements, and ecoaesthetic interventions influence ecological discourse. Fifteen chapters interrogate a range of case studies, from student activism and climate-related art to the role of video games, memes, and machine learning in framing and comprehending environmental collapse. The collection also considers how experimental cinema, podcasts, and documentary practices can move beyond entertainment and spectacle to foster lasting and meaningful action against environmental change. Highlighting the intersections of politics, technology, and aesthetics, this book offers a vital resource for scholars, artists, and activists seeking to navigate and challenge contemporary climate narratives. It argues that creative and technological interventions are essential to rethinking our relationship with the planet and shaping new modes of ecological action.

From the Back Cover

This collection offers an excellent and well-needed contribution to the expanding field of environmental media studies, tying together a range of key but often unconnected areas of intersection between media, art, education and the era of climate crisis. Driven by a strong familiarity with and respect for recent and emerging scholarship, it spotlights cutting-edge scholarship, thought and prose. Like any work on media and the climate crisis, this faces - and admirably lives up to - the challenge of grasping concepts, norms and interventions that are of the moment and passing quickly - it thus offers an important trace record of the development and flux of a current point of great interest across academic disciplines, teaching contexts, artistic practices, and technological morphologies.

--Prof. Hunter Vaughan, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Confronting the Climate Crisis: Activism, Technology and Ecoaesthetics examines how activism, media, and creative practices shape our understanding of and response to the climate crisis. Across media studies, environmental humanities, and artistic research, this collection explores how technologies, movements, and aesthetics influence ecological discourse. Fifteen chapters interrogate a range of case studies, from student activism and climate-related art to how video games, memes, and machine learning frame environmental collapse. The collection also considers how experimental cinema, podcasts, and documentary practices can move beyond entertainment to foster meaningful action. Highlighting politics, technology, and aesthetics, this book offers a vital resource for scholars, artists, and activists seeking to navigate and challenge contemporary climate narratives. It argues that creative and technological interventions are essential to rethinking our relationship with the planet and shaping new modes of ecological action.

Daniel Binns is a tinkerer-theorist exploring creative technology and media cultures. A leading scholar on technologies and storytelling, Daniel has published on AI media, drones, game engines, and the evolution of media genres.

Rebecca Najdowski is an artist-researcher exploring how climate change is visualised through imaging technologies. Through experimental approaches to photographic media, Rebecca investigates the mediation of ecologies and environments.

About the Author

Daniel Binns is a tinkerer-theorist exploring technology's impact on storytelling and media cultures. A leading scholar on digital creativity and media transformation, Daniel has published on AI-generated media, Netflix documentary style, drones, game engines, and the evolution of media genres including the war film and superhero media.

Rebecca Najdowski is an artist-researcher exploring how we visualise climate change through imaging technologies. Through experimental approaches to photographic media, Rebecca investigates the mediation of ecological systems and environmental transformation. Her creative research uses analog experimentation, 3D photogrammetry, and generative AI to build frameworks that question conventional representations of nature.