Join us for a panel and discussion about the ways that film, photography and new media inform how industrial extraction and its environmental and social consequences are witnessed, documented, and memorialized. The panel includes presentations by the following:

Sharon Daniel (Film + Media, UC Santa Cruz)

“In the Fourth World: At the Frontier of Extractivism, Climate Change, and Colonization”

Sharon Daniel is an artist and media activist who creates interactive and participatory documentaries focused on issues of social, racial and environmental injustice, with a particular focus on mass incarceration and the criminal justice system. Her work has been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally - most recently; in a solo exhibition Secret Injustices, at the Schmidt Center Gallery (US, FL, 2017), as an official selection in the Alternate Realities/Interactives exhibition at Sheffield Doc|Fest (UK, 2016), and in the solo exhibition Convictions at STUK Kunstencentrum, (Belgium, 2013). Daniel was honored by the Webby Awards in 2008 and the Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship in 2009. In 2017 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University Belfast School of Art. Daniel is a Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Documentation of exhibitions and links to projects can be found at. http://sharondaniel.net.

Mona Damluji (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) 

“The Afterlives of Oil Media"

Mona Damluji is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Peabody and Emmy Award-nominated producer of the short documentary series The Secret Life of Muslims. Her teaching, research and creative work engages underrepresented media histories and cultural studies of oil, urban space and infrastructure with a focus on the Middle East and its diasporas. Mona's current book project is a history of how petroleum companies have mediated images and ideas of oil in the modern Middle East through film and media sponsorship.

Emily Roehl (Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Scholar) 

"Aerial Media in the #NoDAPL Struggle"

Emily Roehl is an energy humanities scholar who holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on artists and activists who address the unevenly distributed risks of energy development. Roehl is the co-founder of Mystery Spot Books, an artist’s book publisher based in Minneapolis, which is currently producing a multi-publication project on the externalities of energy and industrial waste.

Panel Discussant: Melody Jue (English, UCSB)

Melody Jue is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching interests concern oceans & the environmental humanities, American literature, digital media & media theory, science fiction, science & technology studies, and the relation between theory and practice. She completed her Ph.D. in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, where she was a recipient of the Katherine Goodman Stern Dissertation Completion Fellowship and James B. Duke Graduate Fellowship. Prior to this, she worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Open University of Hong Kong. Melody has published articles in Grey Room, Animations: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, and has forthcoming work in Size & Scale in Literature and Culture. Drawing on the experience of becoming a scuba diver (supported by two Summer Research Fellowships from the Duke Graduate School), her current book project concerns how the ocean shifts our understanding of critical terms in media theory through its conditions of movement, erasure, and dissolution, and how this new understanding might be brought to bear on questions of cultural preservation and environmental justice.