scholarly journals A Study on Interdisciplinary Education Model of Using Climate Change Film-Focusing on Documentary An Inconvenient Truth

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Youngmee Hwang ◽  
OH JUNG JIN
2008 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-81
Author(s):  
Kitty van Vuuren ◽  
Libby Lester

The prominence of media events in 2006, including the release of former US Vice President Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the publication of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even the death of ‘eco-celebrity’ Steve Irwin, suggested a need to devote an issue of Media International Australia to media and the environment. The study of environmentalism through the lens of media, journalism and communication is all but absent in Australia, with some notable exceptions. This issue of MIA goes some way towards redressing the absences identified by Tom Jagtenberg and David McKie in their influential book Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity, published more than 10 years ago, which claimed for the environment an equal status with traditional research foci: class, race and gender. The current public interest in environmental issues emphasises this point, although it is not unprecedented. History shows that environmental issues move in waves to and from the heart of public debate. As well as showcasing some of the field's distinct approaches and traditions, the articles in this issue contribute to a better understanding of this current wave and its likely aftermath. In doing so, it goes some way towards moving the environment in the direction of a more central position on the research and public agenda.


Author(s):  
Michael H. Fox

We, the teeming billions of people on earth, are changing the earth’s climate at an unprecedented rate because we are spewing out greenhouse gases and are heading to a disaster, say most climate scientists. Not so, say the skeptics. We are just experiencing normal variations in earth’s climate and we should all take a big breath, settle down, and worry about something else. Which is it? A national debate has raged for the last several decades about whether anthropogenic (man-made) sources of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other so-called “greenhouse gases“ (primarily methane and nitrous oxide) are causing the world to heat up. This phenomenon is usually called “global warming,” but it is more appropriate to call it “global climate change,” since it is not simply an increase in global temperatures but rather more complex changes to the overall climate. Al Gore is a prominent spokesman for the theory that humans are causing an increase in greenhouse gases leading to global climate change. His movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, gave the message widespread awareness and resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize for him in 2008. However, the message also led to widespread criticism. On the one hand are a few scientists and a large segment of the general American public who believe that there is no connection between increased CO2 in the atmosphere and global climate change, or if there is, it is too expensive to do anything about it, anyway. On the other hand is an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists who have produced enormous numbers of research papers demonstrating that increased CO2 is changing the earth’s climate. The scientific consensus is expressed most clearly in the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 by the United Nations–sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the fourth in a series of reports since 1990. The IPCC began as a group of scientists meeting in Geneva in November 1988 to discuss global climate issues under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 307
Author(s):  
Hedemann

Environmental documentaries attained wider public and academic attention, especially in the aftermath of Al Gore’s prominent documentary on climate change An Inconvenient Truth. Making environmental documentaries is a cinematic form of political advocacy. However, there is a lack of research on the broad range of such films from Germany. While earlier works tended to an accusatory style, newer environmental documentary seems to be more constructive and aiming at spreading information about feasible alternatives. This article pursues three objectives: first, to gain a deeper understanding of the shift from accusatory to constructive documentaries; second, to connect film studies to the political change-making role and therefore to theories of ecological citizenship; and third, to explore the question of what citizenship with a movie camera means. The accusatory and constructive style are associated with agonistic and communitarian ecological citizenship. A sample of two films from the German context, namely Leben ausser Kontrolle produced by Bertram Verhaag in 2004 and Voices of Transition produced by Nils Aguilar in 2012, is analyzed comparatively. The interpretive research method combines methods of studying audio-visual rhetoric with the framing approach from social movement studies.


Author(s):  
Art Dewulf ◽  
Daan Boezeman ◽  
Martinus Vink

Climate change communication in the Netherlands started in the 1950s, but it was not until the late 1970s that the issue earned a place on the public agenda, as an aspect of the energy problem, and in the shadow of controversy about nuclear energy. Driven largely by scientific reports and political initiatives, the first climate change wave can be observed in the period from 1987 to 1989, as part of a broader environmental consciousness wave. The Netherlands took an active role in international climate change initiatives at the time but struggled to achieve domestic emission reductions throughout the 1990s. The political turmoil in the early 2000s dominated Dutch public debate, until An Inconvenient Truth triggered the second climate change wave in 2006–2007, generating peak media attention and broad societal activity. The combination of COP15 and Climategate in late 2009 marked a turning point in Dutch climate change communication, with online communication and climate-sceptic voices gaining much more prominence. Climate change mitigation was pushed down on the societal and political agenda in the 2010s. Climate change adaptation had received much attention during the second climate change wave and had been firmly institutionalized with respect to flood defense and other water management issues. By 2015 a landmark climate change court case and the Paris Agreement at COP21 were fueling climate change communication once again.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Hudson

With a rich mix of theatrical material to bring to the table, the climate-change debate playing out in the public domain would seem well adapted to the stage, and has often been presented in docu-dramatic form, as in Al Gore's well-known film An Inconvenient Truth. But until relatively recently climate change and the science relating to it have been conspicuous by their absence from the stage. Early movers on the climate-change theatre scene included Caryl Churchill's 2006 climate-change libretto for the London Proms, We Turned on the Light, and John Godber's 2007 play Crown Prince. Since then, interest has steadily increased. In 2009 came Steve Waters's double bill The Contingency Plan (On the Beach and Resilience). This was quickly followed by Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett in 2010, and by three further plays in the spring of 2011: Greenland, the collaborative work of Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne; The Heretic by Richard Bean; and Wastwater by Simon Stephens. In this article Julie Hudson focuses on three of these works to explore how the plays engage with the debate through the medium of climate-change science. As her article suggests, these British climate-change plays make an important and occasionally subversive contribution to the long-running discourse on the relationship between science, the ecosystem, and human beings. In performance, they succeed in turning a subject that has been overplayed for effect in the public domain into compelling theatre. Julie Hudson is currently a visiting fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 195-195
Author(s):  
Yan-Jhu Su

Abstract Collaboration among various disciplines is essential to the gerontology curriculum because it is a a new and comprehensive subject. This presentation will discuss the design of interdisciplinary courses to include practical applications in the study of aging. The presenter will share examples based on personal experience to illustrate how music and psychology may be applied to the study of aging. In addition, the presentation will include analysis of actual course designs to show how different fields can be integrated in the classroom setting. This symposium presentation intends to improve cross-discipline applications as well as help students contribute to and benefit from the study of aging.


Author(s):  
Robynn J. Stilwell

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. While the commercial and sociological aspects of technological convergence have been discussed among scholars, producers, and consumers, this chapter explores the aesthetics of convergence and how the technological/historical/aesthetic conventions of distinctly different media can be used as “meta” gestures. Two multimedia products focusing on the same complex topic-climate change-are used to illustrate how audiovisual space is configured differently in “theatrical” and “cinematic” modes and how those spaces can create a higher level rhythm and texture. The film documentaryAn Inconvenient Truthalternates rhetorical theatrical and affective cinematic spaces. The three-part television seriesClimate Warsis markedly more complex and contrapuntal, “theatricalizing” the audience-screen relationship of cinema and deploying a dense, layered visual texture. The soundscape and visual field organize information from relatively straightforward, reinforcing “harmony"; to a counterpoint commenting on earlier documentaries; to streams of information that can overwhelm comprehension, creating affective “bursts” akin to musical stings.


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