Mediating Nature

In 2009, editors Sid Dobrin and Sean Morey published the collection Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature in which contributors addressed how images have shaped popular notions of environmentalism, the environment, and more-than-human nature. Ecosee took up the position that despite the rhetorical power of images connected with environmental movements over the past forty years, scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric.

Technologies of Seeing: Image, Nature, Mediation asks the next question in research pertaining to the visual rhetoric of environmental politics and ecological thinking, questioning the very technologies as mediating devices in the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. This book engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry about the making of image as meaning making. Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking. Technologies of Seeing addresses questions about the technologies used to see and construct nature. Part of the book's larger argument is that analysis of mediations of nature must develop more critical tools of analysis toward the very mediating technologies that produce such media. That is, to truly understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies.

Ultimately, Technologies of Seeing contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. Contributors to this collection push the borders of such thinking in order to forward theoretical considerations and implications of such relationships.