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Publication Testing the Effectiveness of an Ecomedia Literacy Environmental Education Lesson(2024) Lo Iacono, Ludovica; López, Antonio; Visintin, Emilio PaoloThe growing environmental crisis requires innovative educational strategies to promote pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. In this context, ecomedia literacy, which combines ecological education and media to enhance pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, stimulate sustainable actions, and foster critical thinking, represents a promising approach. In this research, we evaluated the effectiveness of an ecomedia literacy-based lesson. Participants (N = 106) were randomly assigned to either an ecomedia literacy group or a control group. Those in the ecomedia literacy group first attended the lesson and then completed a questionnaire to assess pro-environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions, while those in the control group completed the questionnaire before the lesson. The lesson focused on the use of plastic water bottles, and attitudes and intentions were assessed both in general toward the environment and specifically regarding the consumption of plastic bottles. The intervention was not successful in changing intentions or attitudes toward plastic bottles, but some facets of pro-environmental attitudes were better in the ecomedia literacy group than in the control group. The limited effectiveness of the lesson indicates the need for significant changes in content and future strategies to better achieve sustainability goals.Publication Centering Africa in Ecomedia Studies. Interview with Cajetan Iheka(Routledge, 2023) Tola, Miriam; Chu, Kiu-wai; Rust, StephenIn this conversation, Cajetan Iheka discusses his book African Ecomedia and its contribution to ecomedia studies. This volume, published by Duke University Press in 2021, centers Africa as a key site for media production, consumption, and disposal. It comprises five chapters examining a rich media archive produced in African locations, from Ghana to Kenya, Senegal to South Africa, and spanning video art, photography, documentary, and fiction film. African Ecomedia combines attention to the transformative agency of visual media with a focus on the socioecological costs of media processes. Cajetan Iheka is a Professor of English at Yale University. He specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. Iheka is the author of the books African Ecomedia (2021) and Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018), and the editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022).Publication Ecomedia Literacy. A Quickstart Guide(2024) López, AntonioPublication Spray without politics? Contrasting street-based perceptions and computer vision framings of graffitied Rome(Sage, 2023) Levy, Helton; Diamanti, EleonoraThe city of Rome has been a contested site for unauthorized graffiti since antiquity. Modern times have seen graffiti practices endure in their disruptive form and viral versions of digital street art. This paper applies critical, speculative methods to approximate distinct areas of graffiti research into a common framework of analysis. The idea was to offer insights into graffiti audiencing on digital and street-based spheres of perception while discussing the method’s limitations. After listing convergences and divergences between human-centric and algorithm-centric viewpoints, results revealed an interesting set of details uniquely brought up by computer vision metadata, but which, in turn, exposed limitations in recgonizing graffiti as a politicized practice with deep radical roots.Publication Introduction: Teaching Urban Media(2024) Diamanti, EleonoraEleonora Diamanti discusses designing the syllabus for her course "Urban Media" and introduces the essays in the Student Voices section.Publication Sensing the Night: Nocturnal Filmmaking in Guantánamo, Cuba(2021) Diamanti, Eleonora; Boudreault-Fournier, AlexandrineGuardians of the Night (2018) is a short-length film set in Guantánamo, Cuba, that aims to engage with a temporal scape too long disregarded by visual anthropologists: the night. This article, written by the filmmakers, reflects on some of the challenges and opportunities offered by the night for ethnographic fieldwork, filmmaking, and more specifically, sound recording. We locate our work as part of a movement to recognize the night as a spatiotemporal dimension that should be explored further from a sensorial perspective and outside the diecentric focus that social sciences have established in their approaches to social and cultural phenomena.Publication Octopuses, remoras, and surfers: speculative stories from the offline space of digital circulation in Cuba(Taylor and Francis, 2023) Diamanti, Eleonora; Favero, Paolo S. H.This paper focuses on the inventive everyday digital practices that Cubans have put into place to surf the waves of digital scarcity. The paper itself is an experiment in what Donna Haraway calls SF stories (Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation or Speculative Feminism). We will engage in a process of speculative narrative exploring stories about digital practices in Cuba by connecting them to the animal world. Through the use of metaphors belonging to the world of aquatic creatures emerging in our collaborators’ stories, we will address everyday digital practices as symbiotic assemblages. We argue that the speculative mixture of fabulation and aquatic metaphors can function as an antidote to simple dualistic reductions, perhaps offering a critical understanding of the meaning of digital technologies outside Western deterministic and dualistic categories. Part of a larger project on digital culture in Cuba, this paper aims to present a speculative work of fabulation where the animal world meets technology, creative writing and situated stories.Publication The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies(Routledge, 2023) López, Antonio; Ivakhiv, Adrian; Rust, Stephen; Tola, Miriam; Chang, Alenda Y.; Chu, Kiu-waiThe Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies gathers leading work by critical scholars in this burgeoning field. Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, ecomedia studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book gives form to this new area of study and brings together diverse scholarly contributions to explore and give definition to the field. The Handbook highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. Within these areas, authors navigate a range of different topics including infrastructures, supply and manufacturing chains, energy, e-waste, labor, ecofeminism, African and Indigenous ecomedia, environmental justice, environmental media governance, ecopolitical satire, and digital ecologies. The result is a holistic volume that provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, as well as future developments. This volume will be an essential resource for students, educators, and scholars of media studies, cultural studies, film, environmental communication, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Deep gratitude for the generous support of those institutions that provided funding to enable this volume to be available simultaneously in print and open access: University of Oregon Libraries Open Access Publishing Award, Frank J. Guarini School of Busi-ness at John Cabot University, University of Vermont Humanities Center, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Lausanne, and School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University.Publication Ecomedia Literacy Bringing Ecomedia Studies into the Classroom(Routledge, 2023) López, AntonioThe purpose of this chapter is to introduce the methodology of ecomedia literacy and demonstrate how ecomedia studies can be incorporated into any educational setting. Ecomedia literacy is defined as the ability to evaluate and critically engage how everyday media practice enables us to live regeneratively within Earth’s ecological parameters for the present and future. The primary analytical heuristic for this approach is the “ecomediasphere,” which analyzes “ecomedia objects” (gadgets, texts, platforms, etc.) from four different perspectives: ecoculture, political ecology, ecomaterialism, and lifeworld. An ecomedia object is something that has agreed upon properties, but its meaning and use change according to environmental context.Publication When Do Media Become Ecomedia?(Routledge, 2023) Ivakhiv, Adrian; López, AntonioThis chapter explores the conceptual foundations and key theories of ecomedia studies. It provides an overview of the historical development of ecomedia studies and how the field connects with other areas of inquiry, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, postcolonial studies, and Black media philosophy. It discusses key concepts and theories in the field, including how the evolving definitions of media and of ecology shape discourses and attitudes about the interplay between media, technology, communication, and the environment. The chapter concludes by outlining strategies and approaches for future research in ecomedia studies.Publication Greening A Digital Media Culture Course: A Field Report(2013) López, AntonioAs a professor of undergraduate media studies, I have attempted to bridge media education and ecoliteracy by developing an experimental media education approach called Ecomedia Literacy. The framework attempts to balance the strengths of media studies with the concerns of education for sustainability. This paper documents a specific case study in which I introduced sustainability themes into an undergraduate digital technology and culture course by using the Ecomedia Literacy framework.Publication Fake Climate News: How Denying Climate Change is the Ultimate in Fake News(2020) López, Antonio; Share, JeffPublication Bella Gaia and the Pedagogical Power of the Overview Effect: An Interview with Kenji Williams(2020) López, AntonioBella Gaia (Beautiful Earth) is a performance that combines a world-music inspired soundtrack with projected graphics, animations and video to educate about climate change. A hybrid of art and science, the nonlinear performance is an example of an emerging form of ecomedia in which remote sensing media are used to transform audiences to experience Earth as an organic, living organism. Bella Gaia’s creative director and creator, Kenji Williams, discusses this new form of educational experience. The violinist, composer and filmmaker incorporates a neuro-science driven methodology to create “immersive live theater, mixed reality, and interactive data visualization.”Publication Ecomedia: The metaphor that makes a difference(2020) López, AntonioMedia is an ambiguous metaphor that changes meaning depending on how it’s used by educators. Typically media are only characterized by how they represent reality and communicate ideas. Consequently, the metaphor assumes a taken-for-granted meaning that media are immaterial with no environmental impact. Instead, the term ecomedia signals media’s inherent environmentality. This essay introduces our special issue on ecomedia literacy by exploring how the ecomedia metaphor affords a deeper awareness of media’s environmental footprint.Publication Ecomedia Literacy: Decolonizing Media and the Climate Emergency(2021) López, AntonioPublication Algorithms and Climate: An Ecomedia Literacy Perspective(2022) López, Antonio; Frenkel, OliviaDrawing on examples of Bitcoin and climate disinformation, this article demonstrates why Big Tech algorithms have a significant environmental impact and how media literacy educators can respond. Big Tech algorithms reinforce the economic models of surveillance and carbon capitalism, which are dependent on two forms of extractivism: data harvesting and resource extraction. To encourage a holistic environmental analysis of algorithms, ecomedia literacy’s four zone approach enables an investigation from the perspectives of ecoculture, political ecology, ecomateriality, and lifeworld. For media literacy educators, the challenge is to develop curricula and methods that address these different standpoints, which can include critical media literacy, design justice, civic media literacies, news and misinformation literacies, and ethical algorithm audits.Publication Deconstructing Chipotle: Media as Environmental Education(2016) López, AntonioChipotle, a popular fast food restaurant that promotes a sustainability message (“Cultivate a Better World,” “Food with Integrity”), produced two viral animated media campaigns, “Back to the Start” (Chipotle Mexican Grill, 2011, August 25) and “The Scarecrow” (Chipotle Mexican Grill, 2013, September 11). According to the New York Times, “Back to the Start” was rated by Zeta Interactive as one of the Top 10 videos in Internet buzz in 2011. The award-winning “The Scarecrow” also achieved critical praise. Both spots use clever animation and popular culture references to promote a sustainability message, allowing Chipotle to position itself as an ethical food alternative in relation to more conventional fast food venues. Chipotle uses its media campaigns to educate consumers about opposing food production paradigms (local and familyfarming versus factory farming). However, some critics have argued that the campaign is misleading and that Chipotle’s sustainability practices are contradictory and ambiguous; its marketing strategy could be considered to be an example of “greenwashing,” which is the practice of marketing unsustainable products as being positive for the environment. Drawing on media analysis techniques and ecocriticism, students critically assess in a written assignment (six to eight-page paper) the messaging Chipotle uses to promote its ethical and environmental food brand to explore environmental ideologies and ecological discourses. This assignment builds on five lessons: 1) media as environmental education; 2) environmental ideologies; 3) ecocriticism and environmental discourses; 4) food systems and marketing; and 5) greenwashing. The written assignment and lesson plan prompts students to evaluate Chipotle’s environmental claims, and to determine if its media campaigns can be reconciled with its actual business practices. In doing so students gain insights into how media act as a kind of environmental education (or “miseducation,” as the case may be).Publication Ecomedia Literacy & SDGs: A Handbook for Higher Ed(2024) López, AntonioThis handbook provides a guide for integrating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into liberal arts and sciences curricula through the framework of ecomedia literacy. Ecomedia literacy investigates the relationship between media, information and communication technology (ICT), and environmental sustainability, considering both the ecological impacts of media systems and the role of media in shaping environmental awareness and actions. The handbook offers key concepts, learning objectives, interdisciplinary applications, and practical activities to help educators incorporate ecomedia literacy and the SDGs across various disciplines in higher education.Publication Ecomedia Literacy: Educating with Ecomedia Objects and the Ecomediasphere(2020) López, AntonioEcomedia literacy cultivates the exploration of ecomedia objects-- media texts (advertisements, news articles, television commercials, websites, films, etc.), platforms (streaming services, social networks, media organizations), gadgets (smart phones, tablets, computers, etc.), or hyperobjects (anamorphous disbursed phenomena that behaves like a system, such as the internet, fake news, or media industry). In this paper, I introduce an integrative method of analysis I devised called the “ecomediasphere.” The ecomediasphere prompts learners to explore the ecomedia object’s use and meaning from four different perspectives: lifeworld, culture, political economy, and materiality. Conceptually and theoretically, these four perspectives correspond with various lenses that inform digital media literacy and environmental literacy.Publication Integrating Information Literacy in a Communication Writing Course(Association of College and Research Libraries, 2020) López, Antonio; Piotto, Livia; Macias-Gutiérrez, Elizabeth