Guest: Nicolai Skiveren, Screening Waste: An Empirical Reception Study of the Environmental Documentary Plastic China

This week we are visited by Nicolai Skiveren, who will give a presentation of his research project Screening Waste: An Empirical Reception Study of the Environmental Documentary Plastic China

Note that this is an afternoon seminar.

About the seminar

In this talk, Nicolai Skiveren will discuss the emerging field of ‘empirical ecocriticism,’ which is a subfield within the environmental humanities that “focuses on the empirically-grounded study of environmental narrative – in literature, film, television, etc. – and its influence on various audiences.” In the talk, Skiveren will report his findings from an explorative and qualitative reception study of the observational documentary Plastic China (2016), which is a film that portrays the social and environmental consequences of the international plastic recycling industry in China. Methodologically, Skiveren’s study examined 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. In discussing these responses, Skiveren will demonstrate how to employ Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding model of communication as means of analyzing the individual variations within the viewer testimonies along four positions: (i) dominant-hegemonic, (ii) negotiated, (iii) oppositional, and – finally – what Skiveren refers to as (iv) ‘the position of exhaustion.’ In doing so, Skiveren will demonstrate one way in which empirical ecocritics might utilize the qualitative framework of audience reception studies as a way to not only evaluate the actual capacity of an environmental documentary to communicate or represent complex ecological issues, but, more importantly, to identify some of the representational obstacles involved in such an effort.

Bio:

Nicolai Skiveren is a PhD-fellow at the Department of English, Aarhus University. His PhD project, Cinematic Waesthetics, examines the role of waste in contemporary cinema and film. Drawing on various strands of environmental philosophy, ecomedia, and critical waste studies, the project explores the affective potential of moving images in shaping our experiences of and attitudes toward waste.

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It is possible to attend the seminar both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen