Understanding Media Ecology

ISSN: 2374-7676

Media Ecology is a field of inquiry defined as ‘the study of media as environments’. Within this field, the term «medium» can be defined broadly to refer to any human technology or technique, code or symbol system, invention or innovation, system or environment. Media ecology scholarship typically focuses on how technology, symbolic form, and media relate to communication, consciousness, and culture – past, present and future. This series publishes research that furthers the formal development of media ecology as a field of study. Works in this series bring a media ecology approach to bear on specific topics of interest, including theoretical or philosophical investigations concerning the nature and effects of media or a specific medium. Further, this series also publishes books that examine new and emerging technologies and the contemporary media environment, as well as historical studies of media, technology, modes, and codes of communication. Scholarship regarding technique and the technological society is particularly welcome, as is scholarship on specific types of media and culture (e.g., oral and literate cultures, image, etc.). Publications may also consider specific aspects of culture (such as religion, politics, education, journalism, etc.); critical analyses of art and popular culture; and studies of how physical and symbolic environments function as media.

26 publications

Ecological Pedagogy, Curriculum and Scholarship

This book series is premised on the ecological understanding that all of education– all of the living fields of knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools, all of the gestures of teaching and learning itself – is full of relations, interdependencies, ancestries, places, voices animated by lived and learned experiences. Ecological pedagogy, curriculum and scholarship understands that all living fields of knowledge must be taught and learned as such, with all of their intrinsic and animate rigours, complexities, interrelatedness, and earthly responsibilities. In these ecologically sorrowful times, our individual and collective impulse to raise voices of commiseration and encouragement to those working inside and outside of schools bristles with urgency. And this just at a time when the world also seems to be churning with increasing distractions and fakeries whose beneficiaries are not of this earth. Schools and schooling are caught up in ongoing yet ever-shifting inheritances of place and displacement, privilege, colonialism, gender and so on. They are also subject to legacies of indiscriminate standardization, efficiency, fragmentation and all of the ramped-up, exhausting and exhausted distractions of our current age. Education often drags along with its tenacious legacies of thinking and practice that are mostly silent, often silencing, simply taken for granted as just the way things are. Schooling itself, in so many quarters, has become an ecological disaster. Many teachers have studied and voiced these matters, while pursuing more venturous, ecologically sound work in their classroom, all this in deliberate resistance to the marginalization of such work. The series invites scholarly, enlivening and healing ways of researching and writing that attempt to live up to the ecologies of the topics themselves, each in their own ways and languages, each laden with their own ancestries, troubles, and insights – eco-hermeneutics, interpretive research, poetic inquiry, autobiographical and life writing, currere, Indigenous research, arts-based inquiry, storytelling and emergent ways and means of knowing. None of these are merely methodologies. Each involves myriad encounters, myriad relationships, myriad possibilities. In trying to find the measure of what is written within the things written about, these ways are in themselves ecological and pedagogical. They are locales where our relations are worked out, our songs are sung, our silences are shared, and our individual and collective stories are lived, contested, shaped and re-told. The logo for this book series is a Celtic Knot drawn by Eric Jardine in 1992. It became the cover illustration of a self-published book that year. It is a reminder of how long-standing is this current stream of work in education, stretching far back from there. These stretches are part of the ecological imagination itself. This book series is premised on the ecological understanding that all of education– all of the living fields of knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools, all of the gestures of teaching and learning itself – is full of relations, interdependencies, ancestries, places, voices animated by lived and learned experiences. Ecological pedagogy, curriculum and scholarship understands that all living fields of knowledge must be taught and learned as such, with all of their intrinsic and animate rigours, complexities, interrelatedness, and earthly responsibilities. In these ecologically sorrowful times, our individual and collective impulse to raise voices of commiseration and encouragement to those working inside and outside of schools bristles with urgency. And this just at a time when the world also seems to be churning with increasing distractions and fakeries whose beneficiaries are not of this earth. Schools and schooling are caught up in ongoing yet ever-shifting inheritances of place and displacement, privilege, colonialism, gender and so on. They are also subject to legacies of indiscriminate standardization, efficiency, fragmentation and all of the ramped-up, exhausting and exhausted distractions of our current age. Education often drags along with its tenacious legacies of thinking and practice that are mostly silent, often silencing, simply taken for granted as just the way things are. Schooling itself, in so many quarters, has become an ecological disaster. Many teachers have studied and voiced these matters, while pursuing more venturous, ecologically sound work in their classroom, all this in deliberate resistance to the marginalization of such work. The series invites scholarly, enlivening and healing ways of researching and writing that attempt to live up to the ecologies of the topics themselves, each in their own ways and languages, each laden with their own ancestries, troubles, and insights – eco-hermeneutics, interpretive research, poetic inquiry, autobiographical and life writing, currere, Indigenous research, arts-based inquiry, storytelling and emergent ways and means of knowing. None of these are merely methodologies. Each involves myriad encounters, myriad relationships, myriad possibilities. In trying to find the measure of what is written within the things written about, these ways are in themselves ecological and pedagogical. They are locales where our relations are worked out, our songs are sung, our silences are shared, and our individual and collective stories are lived, contested, shaped and re-told. The logo for this book series is a Celtic Knot drawn by Eric Jardine in 1992. It became the cover illustration of a self-published book that year. It is a reminder of how long-standing is this current stream of work in education, stretching far back from there. These stretches are part of the ecological imagination itself.

3 publications