Sidney I. Dobrin

Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment

n the last twenty-five years, theorists and researchers in the social sciences and humanities have embraced the systematic exploration of social relations and culture as integral to the study of the construction of knowledge. Likewise, in composition studies, the social dimensions of language have dominated scholarly conversations concerning the construction of knowledge. In the 1970s and 1980s many composition theorists and researchers began to focus on the social nature of writing and to suggest that the correlation between social experience and writing ability is palpable. This orientation had widespread implications for composition theory, and brought with it, for example, new ways of thinking about an individuals identity (very often, the student in a writing class) and how identity is

Through green eyes: complex visual culture and post‐literacy

By way of reclamation of the metaphor ‘green,’ this paper contends that research regarding the relationships between children’s literatures and cultures and environmental experience requires a reinvigorated consideration of the role of the visual. The heightened importance of visual texts is made evident via three primary, contemporary conditions of textual dissemination: hyper‐circulation, shifts from page to screen as the dominant method of textual transmission, and increases in visuals as the primary mode of information conveyance. The conditions of textual distribution also call to question the status quo understanding of children’s subject formation. This paper contends that by examining new media technologies in conjunction with methodologies borrowed from studies of complex ecology and systems theories, research might be able to better theorize how and why children’s texts influence children’s lived experiences with environments and place. Ultimately, this paper proposes not just that a greater attention to the visual rhetoric of children’s texts is crucial, but that researchers also consider how current contexts encourage child subjects to produce texts as active agents within complex networks, not only interpret them.

Frontier 2.0

The term Digital Environments serves as an umbrella term. Used to distinguish simulated places from ‘real’ places, digital environments signifies a shift in how we think about interactions with places and spaces, both ‘real’ and simulated. The very idea of digital environments, though, complicates such distinctions, asking simultaneously (and perhaps reductively) as to how agents engage networks, and, perhaps more complexly, if there can be such distinctions between virtual and real place, between agents and networks. For ecocritics, the term brings together two concepts that are frequently cast as oppositional: digital standing in for technology/ technological and environments often used to represent nature/wilderness. Thus, reading digital environments as technological nature is not that far of a stretch, asking us to consider not only the relationships between technologies and natures, but the very idea that there can be such distinctions or that there might be technological natures and natural technologies. In this way, then, the play of digital/environment exposes complexities in how we theorise both technology and nature that are often expressed in overly reductive approaches that result in the inevitable exclusivity and polarity between the two ideas. The real and the simulated, the technological and the natural unfold not necessarily in new ways under the digital environments umbrella, but in more flagrant and complex ways that make evident the need for framing technological theories within the gaze of ecocriticism and the need for framing ecocritical theories within technological gazes. This special issue considers the possibilities of bringing ecocritical approaches into conversation with digital environments. The intent is to initiate a dialogue between two areas of research often understood as disparate. On the face of it, such a dialogue might appear counterintuitive in bringing two concepts together which are often understood as working at counter objectives. In fact, more often than not, technology writ large is cast as a primary origin of environmental crisis, the very kind of situation against which much ecocritical research works. Likewise, one may also argue that those who put faith in future technologies to solve current environmental problems are simply procrastinating real environmental work that needs to be done now. But maintaining such reductive binaries in our current cultural, economic, environmental, and technological situation is no longer feasible or realistic. For just as we might read digital environments to distinguish simulated places from ‘real’ places, we should also recognise that this umbrella term is most commonly understood to identify simulated environments created through the complex networks of digital devices upon which so many of us now rely. That is, in many ways, as digital environments become more pervasive, more ubiquitous, they become not simulated environments but the dominant environment in which information circulates, in which we circulate. The simulated space becomes indistinguishable from ‘real’ space in rather significant ways. Or, perhaps more accurately, what we imagine to be real space must be reimagined. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2014 Vol. 18, No. 3, 203–208, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.972139