Films about nature are central to the documentary tradition. Indeed, the mediated relationship between humans and the environment is foundational to nonfiction filmmaking—as Charles Musser points out, illustrated lectures about landscapes and parklands were a direct precursor to documentary cinema.[1] Presently, in an era marked both by the proliferation of documentary forms as well as the acceleration of anthropogenic climate change, the significance of environmental documentary has exploded. As Hito Steyerl argues, increasingly vivid documentary images are everywhere. Yet it often seems that “the closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes.”[2] How does our teaching respond to these interlocking phenomena—the saturation of our lives with both nonfiction images and environmental crises?

As the nine contributions to this dossier make clear, climate change and related human transformations of the earth form a significant marker on our students’ sense of history, politics, and culture. The rapidly shifting meanings of “nature” ripple through our communicative networks and produce a range of semi-synchronized responses among instructors and students both—from anxiety, overwhelm, and malaise; to ironic detachment and bemusement; and, in ideal cases, indignation, refusal, and political mobilization. [3] Where one falls on these spectrums depends on many factors, including our precise positions as racialized subjects embedded in capitalist geographies with unequal distributions of environmental hazards and life chances. Before they reach our classrooms, students carry complex concepts of nature linked not only to their media consumption, but also to their spiritual and cultural traditions, their relationships to outdoor activities, and their exposures to or insulations from environmental racism and slow violence.

The contributors to this dossier are united in our recognition of these facts. In our efforts to maximize the agency of our students, we lean heavily on the affordances of documentary practices and traditions. Following Helen Hughes, environmental documentary should be defined just as elastically as documentary proper—it is constituted not through objective categorization, but through practice, “a collective tendency in the making of films that creates a recognizable form and a community identity.”[4] This openness means that we cannot define environmental documentary strictly through its most conventionally legible forms. As Hughes observes, “the environmental documentary is understood not as a means to disseminate knowledge but as a response in itself to the ideas, beliefs and emotions that emerge in the process of audio-visual research into the environment.”[5] The sense of relationality and emotion in this description is crucial: how one relates to environmental knowledge, how one feels about the experience of acquiring such knowledge, these dimensions must remain central to our pedagogies. Thus, when contributors share their accounts of team teaching with earth scientists, these collaborations are marked by reciprocity between the disciplines, not merely by the annexation of one knowledge into the other.

The most unifying theme across these essays is that documentary practices teach powerful and empowering lessons in observational research methods and “the arts of noticing,”[6] what Suree Towfighnia describes in her dossier entry as the “process of discovery, development, gathering, analyzing, and presenting that centers inquiry and observation." While Towfighnia’s statement is broadly true of any documentary production pedagogy, the valence shifts when focused on environmental themes. Contributors describe “enticing students to see their immediate environment through new eyes” (Pesch); cultivating a “bioregional awareness” that centers their own subjectivities in relation to surrounding landscapes (Khan); and teaching techniques of “listening to the land” (Lopez and Walker).

As a result, a second theme that unifies many of these essays is their situatedness in place. Environmental documentary pedagogy, it seems, is deeply embedded in the local and regional ecologies of the universities in which it is taught, as well as the specificities of our student populations and our own personal or professional identities. My theory-practice course in environmental documentary filmmaking at Portland State University, for example, combined a brief survey of American documentaries about rivers with the assignment to produce a short film about Portland’s Willamette River, reachable via a ten-minute walk from our classroom. This gesture to probe the campus and its adjacent landscapes is echoed in many of the contributions here.

The emphasis on locale will lead readers to no doubt notice that most of the cases in this collection take place at a university in the United States, with the exception of Akintunde Akinleye’s contribution from Canada and James Staunton-Price’s contribution from the United Kingdom. This provincial view should not be dismissed, but neither should the significant diversity that remains. Contributors share work from the Mississippi Gulf, the Texas borderlands, the central California coast, the Pacific Northwest, central Wisconsin, and southwest Nigeria. The majority of contributors works at public universities designated as minority-serving institutions, several of which also serve many non-traditional students, community college transfers, and military veterans. These realities of life, work, and family influence our students’ ideas and ambitions, which in turn influence our own approaches to justice and equity-centered curricula.

Thus, a third unifying theme is a focus on environmental justice and the intersectional analysis of environmental phenomena. As Janet Walker comments on the subject of land acknowledgements in her dialogue with Mia Lopez, “I now find it impossible to study and teach documentaries shot in a particular place without recognizing the original custodians and the relationality of land and waters.” Several contributors center indigenous knowledge, worship, activism, and leadership—modest attempts to counter the epistemic violence inherent in Euro-American environmentalism. Others draw our attention to the geographies of racial domination that exist on or near their campuses, and the ways in which these geographies interact with the nonhuman ecologies that surround them.

Finally, a fourth unifying theme is the relationship between theory and practice in nonfiction film pedagogy. The majority of contributors to this dossier are scholar-practitioners who actively produce moving image work as well as peer-reviewed scholarship, and bring this sense of hybridity to their teaching. This reflects a number of trends. On the one hand, the prevalence of scholar-filmmakers certainly reflects the pressures that early-career academics face to possess multiple skill sets in an over-supplied academic labor market. But it also reflects an increased recognition by our disciplines that knowledge production and theory-making happen just as much through moving image media as scholarly writing, and have since the early days of cinema.[7] That many of us who work as scholar-filmmakers do so around ecological themes reflects another significant development: the increasing legibility of environmental media and ecocinema as both intra- and inter-disciplinary formations. A symbiosis exists between these two trends: media-practice instruction plays an important role in the broader landscape of environmental film and media studies pedagogies while, conversely, environmental film and media studies stimulates and informs how we teach media practice.

I convened this dossier in order to reflect on my own experience teaching hybrid “production seminars” on socio-spatial topics. Across two sections of “Documentary Experiments in Urban Research'' at the University of Pennsylvania and one section of “Environmental Documentary Filmmaking” at Portland State University, I have experimented with project-based audiovisual inquiry into human-nonhuman ecologies. These courses have combined readings in environmental history and theory with film screenings and production workshops that culminate in student short films. I begin these classes with the thesis that experimental documentary, in particular, provides an important and at times overlooked body of environmental knowledge and theory making in the humanities.[8] Experimental documentary on human-nonhuman relations offers powerful models for exploring phenomenologies of socio-natural space, helping us to interrogate the perceptual habits that we direct toward “nature.”[9]

At the same time, teaching these documentary “production seminars” has taught me important lessons about the life experiences, aesthetic ambitions, and political imaginaries of my students. My Environmental Documentary course, for example, was marked in part by one group of students’ pronounced commitment to humor and pleasure in their filmmaking, electing to produce a tongue-in-cheek educational program, Agate Magnet, about hunting for rocks alongside the Willamette River. Engaging explicitly in climate politics or a local environmental justice issue did not interest these students, which I welcomed as a refusal to reproduce traditions of documentary sobriety.[10] Students’ humor also reflects, I believe, their insistence that the first step in fighting for a better future is making life worth living now. Other projects, however, did take a less ironic approach. One such film was a personal documentary about the ongoing dam removal efforts along the Klamath River in Southern Oregon, centering an interview with the filmmaker’s grandfather, a Klamath elder and activist. This student deployed fragmentary and associative editing, using a mix of interview material with a fast-moving visual collage of the Klamath watershed. As such, the film exudes the lyricism and opacity of contemporary experimental films about identity and place, including the works of Sky Hopinka that were screened in this class. Ultimately, the class was able to analyze and reflect on these contrasting modes of environmental perception and representation, and to consider some their projects’ links to ideology, gender, race, and identity.

The articles in this dossier include both short teaching reports as well as several essays that are a bit longer than the traditional Teaching Media Dossier submission. Contributors span a range of career stages, from doctoral candidates to senior scholars and community collaborators. They include scholars who do not work in production team-teaching courses with filmmakers (Lopez and Walker) or teaching seminars and lectures at the intersection of documentary and the environment (Pringle); scholar-filmmakers teaching theory-practice or dedicated production courses (Pesch, Khan, Diller, Staunton-Price); and educators with work histories as documentary professionals bridging their media-making and teaching (Towfighnia, Akinleye, Hermann).

Katrin Pesch opens the collection with an account of service-learning and extracurricular filmmaking at the University of Southern Mississippi, detailing her students’ growing knowledge of their own relationship to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. By taking a site-specific approach that draws upon interdisciplinary resources across the university, Pesch argues filmmaking “can be seen as a form of place-based writing...enticing students to see their immediate environment through new eyes.” Reflecting on student projects to document local community activism as well as coastal research on their own campus, she describes leading students through “an embodied cinematic experience that allows students to engage with the marsh ecologies on which the future of the coastal environment and, by extension, their communities depend.”

Building on Pesch’s concept of place-based writing, Sabiha Ahmad Khan draws upon the concept of the bioregion to explore how her documentary production students at the University of Texas at El Paso inadvertently or subconsciously produce environmental films through the repetition of certain establishing, tracking, and transitional shots of the border landscape. Reflecting on the tendency toward border cliches in some of these student films, Khan reframes her own instinct to counsel students away from these stereotypical images. Instead, connecting as a “diasporic ally” with her own experiences of racialization at the U.S. border, Khan takes these stereotypical visual tropes as a starting point for cultivating students’ bioregional awareness.

Building on Pesch’s account of team-teaching across disciplines and in partnership with community organizations, Suree Towfighnia shares her own experience at Evergreen State College working with students to produce a symposium and related video materials, “The Waters That Connect Us.” The event brought indigenous activists and teachers from across Turtle Island, and was used to kick off a yearlong intensive “Mediaworks” course spanning three terms of coursework for media arts students. Commenting on her sense of students’ environmental malaise and climate change fatigue, Towfighnia argues that both documentary filmmaking and community partnership provide useful antidotes: filmmaking “provides a framework for students to find their role in efforts to engage with the ‘real world,’” and “relational work is an important aspect of combating apathy and angst."

Mia Lopez and Janet Walker reflect on their long-standing collaborations at UCSB’s Carsey Wolf Center, particularly their work co-organizing a four-day symposium, “Water is Life: Standing with Standing Rock,” which brought water protectors to campus for a “discussion and celebration of indigenous-centered leadership, nonviolent direct action, and media activism.” After summarizing their pedagogical philosophies individually, Lopez and Walker share a dialogue surrounding questions of traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous leadership in relation to nonfiction filmmaking pedagogy. As Lopez comments, "We have to remember that there are always people who are connected with the places where we are and that we want to use in our storytelling. We can’t forget them because they’re part of that too. And these places, lands and oceans, already hold a story of their own. Whether you’re doing scientific research or filmmaking, we have to listen to the stories that are there." Lopez and Walker’s central proposal is the concept of “Story Back” as a supplement to land-back frameworks, described as “philosophies and practices to support storytelling led by Indigenous knowledge and stewardship.”

An accomplished documentary photographer turned anthropologist, Akintunde Akinleye recounts his experience bringing his own audiovisual field notes—“video films''—surrounding Yoruba river worship along the Osun River in Southwest Nigeria into a “Religion and Society” class at Carleton University. The audiovisual documents of these rituals teach students details about Yoruba philosophies of nature alongside lessons into the complications of photographic indexicality, especially because although the river itself is visible in these videos, the river spirit is not. Akinleye’s contribution also implicitly centers the foundational relationship between ethnographic methods in anthropology and documentary practices, shedding light on the teaching of contemporary nature-cultures.

Thomas Patrick Pringle reflects on students' bewilderment at the inertia of contemporary climate politics and their repeated question, “how did it get this bad?” An answer can be found, he argues, through a detailed account of the co-evolution of documentary cinema and ecological thought. He shares two non-production courses that guide his students in building “a critical media history of the ecological present,” with the core learning objective that environmental documentaries index across the decades “how people have thought about what constitutes an ‘environment’ and how those conceptions license certain actions.” In other words, exposing students to the entangled genealogies of both nonfiction media making and ecological ideas orients them more firmly in the present historical interval, its constraints and its possibilities. In addition to theorizing these ideas in detail, Pringle includes a unit-by-unit breakdown of the readings and films that he assigns.

Courtney Hermann shares her experience teaching students in a “Branded Media” production course by connecting them with local environmental nonprofits, bridging students’ interests in social-change and professionalization. Hermann’s contribution places the ethical and political imperatives to serve students’ preparedness for paid work in the media industries alongside our commitments to environmental justice. Her essay also reflects the increasing significance of short-form and promotional video production in filmmaking pedagogy, and how production classrooms can serve community partners in their audiovisual needs.

Adam Diller reflects on the influence of climate denialism on campus politics, and argues that documentary pedagogy can play an important role in helping students—many of whom have little to no exposure to climate science—maneuver more confidently amidst the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation warfare. Documentary filmmaking, he argues, provides “valuable pedagogical tools to ground discussions of climate change in students’ observations and experiences.” He describes his decision to focus the departmental documentary production class on campus sustainability efforts, stimulating environmental knowledge through short films about campus energy and waste infrastructures, which had the added impact of highlighting the intersection of local environmental issues with questions of labor and class.

Finally, James Staunton-Price closes the dossier with a provocative, speculative essay exploring the possibilities of a filmmaking pedagogy that fosters an anti-extractive gaze across all scales of human-to-human, human-to-nonhuman, and nonhuman-to-nonhuman relation. Staunton-Price shares a core production exercise that he utilizes to teach students about the nuanced politics of gazing at and through the camera lens. He builds from there toward the concept of a “desire-centered” environmental documentary pedagogy and his commitment to “empower other ways of being” beyond extractivist paradigms.

In aggregate, this Teaching Media Dossier argues for the wide-ranging potential that documentary pedagogy and environmental pedagogy have as two intersecting, transdisciplinary classroom practices. Through their emphasis on the arts of observation and attention, these essays reflect success at promoting critical thinking and creative expression while working to combat cynicism and increase student empowerment. Doing so is not always easy, as we must balance the demands of student professionalization and employability with our commitment to documentary as an exploratory and open-ended artform. We must confront the potent forces of climate denialism that surround and, in some cases, infiltrate our campuses. And we must mitigate both our own and our students’ sense of climate malaise or fatigue. Several contributors make clear the centrality of indigenous sovereignty and cosmologies as essential learning material in any environmental studies context. Several contributors also make clear the value of community-engaged service-learning projects and campus symposia with community partners. Beyond what I have outlined, I hope that readers see many additional connections, synergies, and debates surfacing among the body of work included here, as well as concrete techniques that you can deploy in your own classrooms. And I hope that this dossier serves as a modest starting point for ongoing conversations, research, and writing in the years to come.

Ben Mendelsohn is an Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Culture in Portland State University’s School of Film, where he teaches film and media production, theory, and history. He is currently writing a book about the intersections of visual culture, documentary media, and urban coastal ecologies in Lagos, Nigeria. His most recent documentary, As If Sand Were Stone... (2019), investigates dredging and sand filling along the New York City waterfront, and has screened at the Rockaway Film Festival, Athens (Ohio) International Film and Video Festival, and the Batalha Centro de Cinema, among other venues.

1. Charles Musser, “Trauma, Truth and the Environmental Documentary,” in Eco-Trauma Cinema (London: Routledge, 2014). ↑

2. Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” Re-visiones no. 1 (2011): accessed March 14, 2024, http://re-visiones.net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html. ↑

3. On the pervasive phenomenon of climate anxiety among undergraduate students, Sarah Jaquette Ray remarks that the “problem comes back to their being so frozen by their fears that they are unable to desire—or, yes, even imagine—the future.” Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 2. ↑

4. Helen Hughes, Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the Twenty-First Century (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2014), 9. ↑

5. Hughes, Green Documentary, 5. ↑

6. Both Katrin Pesch and James Staunton-Price cite Anna Tsing’s concept of “the arts of noticing” in their dossier entries. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). ↑

7. I am thinking here with Timothy Corrigan and Nora Alter, whose work on the history and present of essay cinema not only reflects the significance of moving-image essays to contemporary scholars and scholar-makers, but also documents important histories of theory-making and argument through film form. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, eds., Essays on the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). ↑

8. The argument that experimental documentary has made important contributions to the environmental humanities was the focus of “Geosocial Encounters,” a symposium and film program that I co-organized at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 with Rahul Mukherjee. ↑

9. I am invoking here Scott MacDonald’s thesis that the job of ecocinema is “a retraining of perception,” as well his observation that in recent decades, many “visual artists working both in 16 mm celluloid filmmaking and in digital video have been providing visual/auditory training in appreciating the experience of an immersion within natural processes.” Scott MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17-42. ↑

10. My students’ irreverence echoes Nicole Seymour’s observation that “just as environmental crisis is, from certain vantage points, laden with ironies and absurdities, we can also find those elements in the discourse around it.” Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 9. ↑