Nicolai Skiveren

This project explores the afterlives of environmental narratives by asking what happens once we’ve put a novel back on the shelf, turned off the television, or scrolled past a climate change video on our phone. By examining how films, television, and social media stories linger, change, or fade, the project seeks to understand media’s role in shaping public engagement with the climate crisis. Stories can shift how we see the world and ourselves, making them powerful tools for addressing the climate crisis. While past research has shown that storytelling can spark emotions, awareness, and short-term behaviour change, we know very little about its long-term effects. This project fills that gap, offering insights into how narratives can affect citizens navigating multiple global crises. Two studies will track narrative reception over time. The first will document how a single story can unfold across six months, using interviews and surveys with Danish citizens. The second study will map how young adults experience the wider flow of environmental stories in their daily digital lives. Together, they will provide the first in-depth look at the afterlives of environmental narratives.

The N.E.S.T. Research Network aims to unite five early career postdoctoral researchers from diverse European universities and backgrounds to address the urgent challenges of climate change through the study of narratives capable of raising awareness, addressing ethical concerns, and offering practical solutions to ecological crises in local communities. Specifically, this project focuses on past and present literary and cultural texts – including poems, short stories, novels, but also movies, video games and other media – to explore environmental issues specific to critical areas in the European countries involved in the network (e.g. Po Valley air pollution in Italy; concerns associated with its oil industry in Norway, etc.) in order to emphasizes ecological urgencies while seeking more ethical human-nonhuman relational behaviors as a response to them. Aligned with the PNR objectives 2021-2027, the network endeavors to transform societal perceptions of the environment by highlighting the interconnectedness between humans and nonhumans (plants, animals, organic and inorganic materials, etc.) and aiming to challenge the anthropocentric and dualistic axioms that have led to the Anthropocene by prompting more sustainable lifestyles. The project engages with updated scholarly debates on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and education within the context of Environmental Humanities in two primary ways: - On a more theoretical level, it investigates textual representations of environmental issues in critical European areas, intending to map (present and past; latent and more evident) narrative sources capable of addressing these issues while having an impact on local communities exposed to them. The impact is intended, in alignment with the PNR objectives, in terms of increasing awareness of current crises and changing behaviors in a more ethical and sustainable way. The research activity of the network is grounded in the notion of ‘nesting’– as an original conceptual tool to be further developed during the research activity – which reminds to the sense of creating a nest or a sheltered space for one’s offspring or oneself, or placing or embedding one thing within another to assess relationality and complexity; in this twofold sense, attention is dedicated to texts a) stressing care toward the physical shared environment of human and non-human lives (here conceived as the oikos – common home) while rebuilding and repairing it for the sake of new generations; b) prompting a transdisciplinary approach to tackle the complexity of urgent crises with innovative and creative approaches towards texts, combining different skills and competences. - On a more practical level, the project wishes to enrich public discourse on these issues by conducting narrative-based workshops, involving the selected texts, with local communities that engage lifelong educational practices. These initiatives – like collective performance, co-writing, call-to-actions, public readings, storytelling, etc. – create a direct impact on the participants both in terms of emotional connection to the issues addressed and in empowering them to be protagonists of change through daily actions and choice. Investigators will eventually dedicate attention to empirically evaluating the impact of these initiatives through innovative methodologies derived from recent developments in ecocriticism, such as affective ecocriticism and empirical ecocriticism. This bottom-up approach for addressing climate change uses literature and cultural heritage to prompt critical thinking, bridge local and global concerns, and facilitate sharing best practices between academia and civil society. Its aim is to enhance collective involvement and encourage a dynamic exchange of viewpoints and critiques about present challenges, forging an affirmative, forward-thinking connection between theory and practice.

This project aims to explore how documentary films can help us respond better to the challenges of the contemporary environmental crisis. Focusing especially on food production, which today accounts for approximately 26% of global CO2 emissions, the study seeks to investigate how people respond to films that portray the negative consequences of commercial fishing and industrial agriculture. The study is particularly interested in the impact that such documentaries might have on their viewers and whether they might lead to changes in awareness, attitude, and behavior. In doing so, the project contributes new knowledge about how one of the most widely distributed and consumed forms of contemporary media can contribute to mobilizing prosocial behavior in a time of rapid social and ecological change.

Media as Infrastructure? Investigating Nordic Ecomedia (MIINE) is a cross-disciplinary workshop series. Gathering researchers from LNUC Intermedial and multimodal studies, NTNU in Trondheim, and Aarhus University, we aim to open novel perspectives on the roles and functions of media in relation to contemporary ecological crises and catastrophes. To make sense of these crises and catastrophes but also to face the challenges they entail, we argue that a focus on media, i.e. on that which stands between a living organism and its organism, is vital. Media needs to be analysed both with respect to the limits they impose on the relation between human and environment and with respect to how they are used to communicate and mediate the environmental crises. By media we refer to any item serving to mediate between two human or non-human entities. It may be a scientific report, but also an artistic practice a literary text or a tree. Media are the means to communicate with each other and with our surroundings – thereby they also constitute an integral part of the set of historical and discursive conditions determining our relationship with our surroundings. In MIINE, it is these two aspects of the role and significance of media that we intend to examine. Two media theoretical perspectives usually kept apart thus meet in this project: a media ecological approach and an intermedial approach. These two perspectives have been developed within separate traditions. By combining them, we suggest that it is possible to advance both fields of research and to further develop the theoretical models currently in use by ecocritical, intermedial and media-ecological scholars.

This article-based PhD dissertation investigates the depiction of waste in contemporary film and television. By foregrounding the varied aesthetics of waste – what I term ‘waesthetics’ – the study charts the representation of waste in contemporary cinema and discusses the capacity of such representations to change the way we relate to waste today. Thus, the aim of the dissertation is to further our understanding of visual media’s role in shaping our perception of the complex, intersecting issues that make up the contemporary ecological crisis. In undertaking this study, the project brings together a variety of concepts and approaches gleaned from across the environmental humanities. In terms of theory, the dissertation draws on critical writings from the field of waste studies and attempts to connect these with the ecological insights of new materialism and ecocritical theory. With a point of departure in these fields, the project’s hypothesis is that film, as an audio-visual medium, holds the capacity to change the way we think and feel about waste today. This hypothesis gives rise to a range of unexplored sub-questions concerning the film medium, the film experience, and the relationship between film, society, and the environment: How do contemporary films represent waste? What are the functions (aesthetic, narrative, symbolic, affective) of waste in films? By what means does waste in film generate affective and emotional experiences? Why is it that images of waste in one moment can produce disgust and dread, but in the next enchantment and awe? In what ways might films affect our individual behaviors as well as broader societal developments, and how might such interactions be documented? In addition to this emphasis on film as an instrument capable of mobilizing alternative perceptions and sensitivities, the dissertation furthermore considers the filmic representation of waste as an example of how the ecological crisis is expressed by our cultural imaginary (as reflected by and negotiated in the cultural products we consume). Whether in the form of CO2 emissions, biomagnification, radioactive fallout, or plastic pollution, waste appears more than ever before to be everywhere and nowhere at once, as the byproducts of human activity have come to saturate every corner of the earth, proliferating in quantities that are both ever increasing and ever more difficult to encapsulate. This ubiquity, the dissertation contends, can be traced in the world of film and television on multiple levels and across genre. Engaging a diverse corpus of films – including fiction (Blade Runner 2049 (2017), District 9 (2009), Idiocracy (2006)); TV series (Chernobyl 2019)); documentary (Seaspiracy (2021), Plastic China (2016)); as well as satirical mockumentaries, and environmental campaign videos (Finding Beauty in Garbage (2019), The Majestic Plastic Bag (2010)) – the dissertation argues that waste raises some of the key ethical questions and epistemological issues that characterize the ecological crisis: How does the ecological crisis affect countries and communities differently? Who has the option (and the right to) discard and who is forced to live in (and off) the waste of others? How do we – as human beings – come to terms with living in an era where processes such as anthropogenic climate change and ocean pollution appears to be increasingly beyond human control? In seeking to answer such questions, the dissertation draws on the methodologies and analytical models found within the fields of ecomedia/ecocinema (Hochman 1998; Ingram 2000; Brereton 2005; Cubitt 2005; Ivakhiv 2008, 2013; Lu & Mi 2009; Murray & Heumann 2009, 2016, 2018, 2022; Rust, Monani, & Cubitt 2013, 2016; Willoquet-Maricondi 2010b; Kääpä & Gustafsson 2013; Weik von Mossner 2014, 2017; Alex & Deborah 2016; Parham 2016), which explore the relationship between the environment and (primarily non-print) media. These approaches are furthermore connected to the aesthetic and philosophical perspectives of material ecocriticism (Sullivan 2012; Iovino & Oppermann 2014; Iovino 2018), which is a subbranch of ecocritical theory that explores the narrative capacities of materiality. Consequently, the articles that comprise the dissertation attempt to translate a number of materially oriented ecocritical concepts such as ‘storied matter’ (Iovino & Oppermann 2014), ‘trans-corporeality’ (Alaimo 2010), and ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) into the context of film analysis. Finally, the articles demonstrate how such concepts can be utilized analytically through a variety of methods, including intermedial analysis, empirical reception studies as well as more conventional approaches such as content analysis, formalist analysis, and close reading. Thus, the dissertation’s research contribution consists in producing new methods, analyses, and readings situated within the disciplinary intersection of ecocriticism, ecomedia/ecodinema, new materialism, and waste studies. The first article “Cinematic Waesthetics: Wasted Worlds, Wasted Lives, and Becoming-Waste in Contemporary Science Fiction Film” explores the aesthetic, affective, and epistemological connections that bind together science fiction (SF) and the varied forms of waste that have come to permeate the genre’s filmic depictions of the future. Drawing especially on Adrian Ivakhiv’s tripartite model for an eco-philosophy of the cinema (2014), the article calls attention to the often-subtle, yet distinct ways in which waste participates in (i) cinematic world-building, (ii) representations of otherness, and (iii) depictions of radical forms of change. Taken together, these three modes, the article contends, represent a suggestive image of how waste forms part of contemporary SF film. By presenting this comparative overview, the article offers an appropriate entry into the dissertation’s investigation, as it makes tangible the wide breadth and flexibility of cinematic waste as a motif and a material process. The second article “Spectral Toxicity: Atmospheres of Radiation in HBO’s Chernobyl and Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl” presents a comparative analysis of HBO’s mini-series Chernobyl (2019) and Svetlana Alexievich’s literary testimonies Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997) – both of which represent the events and the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. As a case study in intermedial ecocriticism, the comparative study investigates the ability of each media product to make perceptible the forces of radiation, focusing in particular on what it feels like to inhabit the atmospheres of contamination that the two media products invite their viewers and readers to enter. The article then proceeds to develop the neologism ‘spectral toxicity’ as a means to describe these atmospheres in which the presence of a threatening nonhuman force feels immanent and impending while also remaining imperceptible. The third article “Screening Waste, Feeling Slow Violence: An Empirical Reception Study of the Environmental Documentary Plastic China” explores the representational challenges of slow violence from an empirical perspective. The article does this by reporting the findings of an explorative and qualitative reception study of the observational documentary Plastic China (2016), a film that portrays the social and environmental consequences of the international plastic recycling industry in China. Methodologically, the study examines the experiences of a group of Danish viewers (N=14) using qualitative interviewing to map their different affective reactions to the film as well as the active efforts they made to interpret it. Discussing these testimonies, the article points to some of the difficulties that observational documentaries might face in giving form to slow violence. Amongst other things, the article emphasizes the negative emotions of fatigue and irritation that some viewers may experience, when presented with issues like global inequality or plastic pollution. The fourth article “Humor and Ecomedia” examines the use of humor in contemporary environmental short films about waste. The article responds to ongoing debates within the environmental humanities about the immobilizing effects of apocalyptic rhetoric and the growing fatigue with the doom-and-gloom registers of crisis discourse, as documented in the above-mentioned article. By looking at two short films – Finding Beauty in Garbage (2019) and The Majestic Plastic Bag (2010) – the article suggests that humor, as a representational strategy, presents a promising alternative to the confining strictures of mainstream environmental discourse. As experimental representational forms, the films both surprise and challenge normative perceptions of waste by inviting viewers to entertain the idea that waste might be a source of beauty (as opposed to being an eyesore) and might be alive (as opposed to being dead matter). Thus, the article argues that the use of humor can be read as expressing a radical form of hope that points to other ways of interacting with waste and, by analogy, the natural environment in general. The fifth and final article “Conspiratorial Storytelling and Oceanic Crisis: On the Rhetoric of Suspicion in Seaspiracy” critically examines the emergent trend amongst environmentalist filmmakers to make use of conspiratorial narratives in conveying messages about environmental risks. Looking at the recent Netflix documentary Seaspiracy (2021), which explores the topics of oceanic waste and industrial fishing, I demonstrate – along with my co-author, Magnus Andersen – how the film’s conspiratorial narrative is characterized by three defining features: (i) high narrative velocity, (ii) a relatable protagonist whose loss and recuperation of agency constitutes the narrative arc, and (iii) the collectivization of antagonistic forces. Analyzing these features, we argue that the conspiratorial narrative represents an extremely effective rhetorical tool for providing a cohesive explanation for the otherwise bewildering array of relations that comprise the exploitation of the ocean. Thus, we claim that the appeal of the conspiratorial narrative lies precisely in its affordance to transform the feelings of powerlessness that result from the ecological crisis into a sense of being able to see through – and thereby fight – such a crisis. However, at the same time, the conspiratorial narrative has its weaknesses, the most important being its radical nature: Conspiracies are known for being polarizing, and they can spread mistrust toward authorities and experts. Furthermore, conspiracy theories have often been critiqued for being too simplistic, thereby not allowing us to reconcile with the complexity that characterizes ecological crisis. Thus, the article concludes that the ongoing migration of conspiracy theory in area of eco-documentary constitutes a fundamentally ambivalent moment in environmnetal communication, where affective dispositions of frustration, mistrust, and powerlessness are all in play. With this article, the dissertation arrives at an ending that appropriately points toward one of the most recent tendencies within environmental filmmaking – here focusing on the exploitation and destruction of the ocean ecosystem. By presenting these studies, the dissertation thus presents new insights into the varied ways that waste is represented in contemporary film and TV series. Likewise, the dissertation demonstrates how such representations might be studied using a variety of methodological and analytical approaches. As a result of this work, the dissertation concludes that film and TV series represents a productive prism through which our collective feelings and narratives about the ongoing ecological crisis may be explored. Finally, the dissertation points to the potential of film, TV series, and other media to make visible environmental phenomena that are either underrepresented or otherwise difficult to relate to. Thus, the dissertation argues that film and TV series represents an important resource for understanding better the problems of ecological crisis as well as mobilizing a capacity (and willingness) to change the world for the better.