Disaster Media: Bending the Curve of Ecological Disruption and Moving toward Social Justice

Abstract

This essay introduces a special stream of Media+Environment focused on "disaster media." In the process, the authors conceptualize this term in relation to "natural" and other disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and explore how understandings of "disaster media" are embedded within several areas of humanities-based film and media scholarship. Writing from the social ecological premise that consequences of disasters stem in large part from systemic actions, the introduction develops three general arguments about disaster media as an analytic. First, disasters cause people to rethink what "media" are and to contend with the fact that, especially during disasters, media are constantly changing and being updated; they also escape the screen and sculpt the environment (media are not only representational but also affective and infrastructural). Second, because they come to the fore in relation to crisis situations, disaster media help expose structural inequalities; practices of relief and reform need to happen and can be facilitated (or inhibited) by mediatic means. Finally, disaster media need to be considered in relation to the multiple temporalities of climate disruption (from the longue durée of glacial flow to uncertain and sudden extreme weather). Discussing these issues, the authors also introduce pieces in the stream that are focused on humanitarian drone interventions and glacier-melt artworks.At the end of 2018, we conceived of a thematic issue-or "stream," in this journal's parlance-to engage Media+Environment's commitment to publishing research about media as variously representational, infrastructural, and elemental, yet always already environmental. "Disaster media," as we call this stream, aims to analyze how media emerge and change shape during crisis situations and to cultivate attention to new modes of disaster relief and

Mapping (as) Resistance: Decolonizing↔Indigenizing Journalistic Cartography

“…As Parks and Walker (2020) emphasize, news media become particularly important and influential in crisis situations to significantly influence not only public opinion and understanding but also associated short-and long-term governmental intervention and relief responses or lack thereof. As such, news media hold the power to either reinforce or disrupt societal inequities and, in cases of Indigenous socioecological disaster, support either the colonially motivated destruction or community-led preservation and resurgence of landand water-based Indigenous cultures.…”

“…As indicated in the call for papers for the Disaster Media stream of Media+Environment, contemporary news media must be considered as both representative of and influential upon broader societal beliefs and understanding-they play an important role in curating public opinion on and understanding of such dynamics (Brady and Kelly 2017;Endres 2012;Gilbert et al 2019). As Parks and Walker (2020) suggest, there is a pressing need for public news media that promote critical understanding, facilitates increased voice for and representation of marginalized peoples, and advocates for equitable relief from socioecological disaster in a spirit of social and environmental justice.…”

Monitoring Corals from Rescue to Care with ArcGIS and Flickr

“…They render the current disaster of coral disease as one event in the life of the corals rather than the end of life, and convey the standard of care that entwines the corals with their caregivers. In this capacity, the Dashboard and the photo series exemplify the "disaster media" paradigm set out by Parks and Walker (2020). As the Dashboard transitions from intermediation monitoring of rescue to care with successful restoration activities (as with the 2020 nursery-raised staghorn coral outplant spawning event), and simultaneously holds us accountable for the anthropogenic contributing factors-a warming planet, development, pollution-it extends disaster media from a response to a standard that provides the necessary relief for survival.…”

“…In keeping with the theme of this stream of the journal, I see the coral disease and the Dashboard as situated at the intersection of disaster, media, and relief. Conceptually speaking, if "disaster media" "names the project of attuning to ways that media are both complicit in the amplification of disastrous occurrence and helpful in the provision of reckoning and relief, support and succor" (Parks and Walker 2020), then the use of mediated means to study and intervene in coral health on Florida's Atlantic coast constitutes an instance of disaster media that inclines toward disaster relief while raising important questions of human-nonhuman relationships of care.…”

Humorous Audio-Visual Lockdown Works

“…However, the need to keep social distance and the restrictions on public life worked to accelerate that process. The fact that much of the world's population had to relocate substantial aspects of their lives to screen-based media was a crucial factor in this acceleration (Parks & Walker, 2020;Denson, 2020).…”