MEDIATING NATURE

Mediating Nature was published by the Routledge International Library of Sociology in October 2006. Offering a cultural history of the present forms of imagining nature and the environment, this book focuses on the relationship between the emergence of environmentalist practices and the development and consolidation of a variety of forms of mass mediation.

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From the Back Cover

"Mediating Nature provides a history of the present nature of mass mediation. It examines the ways in which a number of discourses, genres, institutions and technologies of observation have historically shaped the current ways of imagining the nature of nature, and the nature of mass mediation. Where much of the existing research treats mass mediation as a matter of media technologies, texts, audiences, or institutions, the current book adopts a somewhat different approach that breaks down the conventional boundaries between these elements: it considers ‘mass mediation’ as a historical process by means of which the members of audiences and indeed publics more generally have been taught to be observers of, if not in, nature. As part of this approach, the book offers an investigation of the historical interrelation of a number of social genres and their characteristic techniques of observation. These include landscape paintings and gardens, modern zoos, photography, early cinema, nature essays, disaster and ‘animal attack’ films, as well as wildlife documentaries on television. An integral aspect of the investigation involves what Lindahl Elliot describes as a ‘social semeiotic’ methodology that combines the semeiotic theory of Charles Peirce with a historical sociology of cultural formations. This enables the book to challenge some of the assumptions of naturalist, but also of culturalist and postmodern discourses about the nature of nature, and the nature of mass mediation.

Topical and timely, this fascinating book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the fields of media, sociology, cultural geography and environmental studies."

Click here to read a review by Anna Davies in the Journal of Cultural Geographies.

According to Davies,

"Mediating nature opens with the statement that it ‘offers a history of the present nature of mass mediation’ (p. 1). The use of such an ambiguous declaration as a first gambit is a deliberate ploy to open up a space to discuss and disrupt commonplace conceptions of cultural concepts such as ‘nature’, ‘mass mediation’ and ‘history of the present’. While the nature of ‘nature’ has been given considerable attention in the academic sphere in recent years it is by engaging with this literature alongside more critical understandings of mass mediation as a historical process that the book carves out its niche. Attention to mass mediation, which is defined more expansively as ‘the historical process involving a panoply of pedagogies of massification’ (p. 4), is usefully extended beyond what is commonly referred to as the mass media. In this sense the arena of interest for Mediating nature includes not only media coverage of nature through television programmes, the print media or films but also experiences of (and in) parks, zoos and museums. What is most refreshing about the text is its attempt to build bridges between non-representational and non-non-representational theories, a new conceptual divide within geography."