Digital & Multimodal Humanities

Climate Change Populism in Ecocinema

Presented at "The World in 2050: Creating/Imagining Just Climate Futures, A Nearly Carbon-Neutral Online Conference

University of California at Santa Barbara

Published on Oct 12, 2016

Climate change populism—the social condition where ordinary people embody and act on an emerging awareness of the destructive human behaviors that cause climate change—has become a potent transnational trend reflected in global cinema. My talk shows how contemporary filmmakers use cinematic imaginaries to reveal the speculative fears humans have about global climate change—which largely include access to hydro, food, and energy resources, survival beyond extreme weather events, and coping with the occurrence of environmental illness.