TDAI is pleased to present Dr. Thomas Patrick Pringle (University of Southern California) who will be presenting a paper in progress entitled "Political Climates: Proxy, Population, and Global Heating" on Friday, Nov. 3, at 12:00 p.m. EDT in 301 Pomerene and on Zoom. The respondent will be Dr. Nancy Ettlinger (Geography) and the event will be hosted by Dr. Harshavardhan Bhat, TDAI Postdoctoral Fellow on Race & Responsible Data Science, and Dr. Brett Zehner, TDAI Postdoctoral Fellow on Art & Data.
This event is part of the Abolitionist Epistemologies Working Group supported by the Humanities Institute and the Translational Data Analytics Institute.
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Paper abstract
Looking to the legacy of eugenic arguments in American environmentalism alongside the historical communication of those ideas, this talk focuses on how U.S. media campaigns in the 2000s sought to tie the future of climate change not just to population growth but to immigration. American climate conservatism has a history beyond denial, including climate data. Confronting this xenophobic genealogy is critical to understanding the obstinate equation between population and global warming in film and media.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Patrick Pringle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. His work focuses on historical approaches to film and emphasizes how media shape how environments are conceived in a given place and time and how technologies interact with physical environments. His writing on cinema, media, and the environment appears in the journals New Media & Society, Spectator, Heliotrope, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and Journal of Film and Video, as well as the volume Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (ed. Livia Monnet, 2022).
