COMM 2015-301
Spring 2025, University of Pennsylvania
Co-taught with Matt Parker

How does the environment factor into the production, design, and use of media technologies and infrastructures? How does media shape the way we think about the natural environment? How do we make our media sustainable in an era of climate change?

This interdisciplinary course explores the relationship between humans, media technologies, and the environment. Students will learn how the more-than-human world shapes communication technologies, from beacon fires and carrier pigeons to telegraph cables, radio, fiber optics, and satellites.

The photo above shows a student’s final project. The prompt was to create a media object that illustrates a new geological era akin to the “Anthropocene.” The student imagined a new planetary era where “old” media objects like iPhones are recovered at archaeological sites.

FTV 331 (Film, Media, and Social Justice)
Spring 2024, Loyola Marymount University

Cinema creates worlds: a film illuminates for us physical and social relationships that structure the world and enliven the actors that occupy it. How does the natural environment exist in this world? How does cinema influence our relationship to the planet?

In this course, we investigate how cinematic media privileges, mediates, and even conceals the ecological through film form with political, ethical, ideological, and economic concerns and frameworks. We explore the relationship between moving image media and the environment, investigating how themes like global climate change, extreme weather events, colonialism and environmental racism, ecofeminism, wilderness, animal rights, anthropocentrism, and technology, are explicitly and implicitly expressed through the cinematic image. In addition, this course also examines the material impact of film and media infrastructures on the environment. 

The photo features two of the many films screened in this class: Safe (1995, dir. Haynes) and Behemoth (2015, dir. Liang).

FTV 2100
Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Loyola Marymount University

This class offers a historical survey of international film movements and their social, political, and economic determinants. The image above features some of the films screened during the semester: (clockwise from top left) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920); The Goddess (dir. Wu Yonggang, 1934); Land Without Bread (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1933); The Smiling Madame Beudet (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1923); A Page of Madness (dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926).

Alongside the social, political, economic, and aesthetic determinants that influenced these early films, the class also introduces students to different subfields and methodologies within the field of film studies, such as ecocriticism, feminist film studies, experimental cinema, and documentary film studies.