 Let me welcome everybody welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you all here today We have a terrific guest with a great subject, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation Now this week we bring together two great huge topics, and we do so in the person of a great scholar For years now. We've been taking a look at information literacy in the Future Transform and digital literacy What does it mean to be a savvy, critical, and productive consumer and user of digital content and information in a modern age? At the same time, more recently, we've been looking into what does it mean to do this in an ecological framework Specifically during the climate emergency. Now Professor Antonio Lopez, an associate professor of communications and media studies at John Cabot University in Rome, has brought these two together into what he calls Eco-media literacy. This is a new project, a new way of seeing the world, and he is the inventor and the world's expert So I'm going to bring him up on stage so he can explain what this is, how we can engage with it, and best of all So he can answer all of your questions. So without any further ado, welcome Professor Lopez Hi, thank you for having me. Oh, it's great to see you. Oh, it's a real pleasure. Where have we found you today? Well, I'm in my office in Rome. Luckily, you probably cannot hear the helicopter that's hovering over my building Because today we have a new president and they shot off 21 cannons I'm below this hill where every day they shoot off a cannon at noon, but today there was 21 in honor of the new president So it's been quite noisy. I think it's finally gotten quiet Well, so if we hear any gunfire or artillery playing, we'll know it's just ordinary life in the great city That's correct Well, Professor Lopez, we like to introduce people on this program by asking them to look ahead to the next year and describe What they're going to be working on. So please tell us what are what are the projects? And what are the ideas that are going to be uppermost in your mind for the rest of 2022? Well, that's an excellent question and I have some very interesting projects on the horizon One is that I'm very Pleased to be a part of a collaboration with several other editors to put a get together a book for a Routledge a Handbook of eco media studies We'll get more into in a little bit but eco media studies is an emerging field that sort of combines different fields like environmental humanities and media studies and Post-colonial studies and so forth So this collection will be the first there is a book called eco media Which is a great collection and one of the editors of that book is my co-editor Steven Ross But this book we're in the process of assembling. We have great chapters. I'm in the middle of editing it So that's taking a lot of work and then in the fall I plan on teaching a class called eco cinema, which is one of my favorite courses to teach and I'm super excited because there's new scholarship coming out of Africa. That's connecting many of the issues of ecological degradation in Africa with with media studies and We're gonna one of the films we're gonna screen is Black Panther and talk about how that connects to ecology Sure, many of you and many of you saw that and I've also Proposed this dot like earth shattering But I'm working on trying to create a minor and environmental studies at my university And one of the interesting challenges of that is like what department do you put it? Which this will kind of come up in terms of the siloing of knowledge and you know, where where does it live in the Sciences and the humanities and the social science. So these are sort of major things that I'm working on aside from normal writing and blogging and all that all of that When does when does the new Rutledge collection? When was that scheduled? Well, the manuscript is due in October. So it'll be in 2023. I'm so excited. I wish it could come out Oh, and the most important project that I should mention is the eco media literacy Dot org website, which there's a link to here and I'm in the process of raising money I don't know if I know that amicoll is an organization that you have done some work with and I don't know if any members of Amicoll are in this meeting but Amicoll has given me a small grant to start developing this. I'm looking for more But the idea of eco media literacy dot org is to have a online resource for teachers It could be an information literacy or I mean business. It could be anything But I'm focused mostly in people who teach media and digital media That they don't really they're interested in the environment and they want to bring it into their classes But they don't necessarily know how and this website would you could go there and there could be lessons for you there meet media examples links and so forth also to help do for students to do research because I Part of this grew out of the what I was doing at my library at the university, which is we didn't really have centralized location for student research on Media and the environment so I started creating this Resource at the library and I split it off and sort of trying to create an international website that anyone can use for free The open access and so if anyone was interested in contributing and collaborating, you know, please by all means get in touch We have a link to that should be on the bottom left of your screen kind of mustard colored button And you can click on that and learn a great deal and Just a warning is a beta version, but you know, it'll by the end of the year. It looks really nice Hey, it's in WordPress so you can do whatever you want. That's right So please my pounce on that friends and I give our give our guest feedback and use it as you can Well, it sounds like a very very busy year for you And I'm gonna resist the temptation to recommend movies for your class this fall Could you just to begin with for everybody who is here, can you give us a quick definition of what eco-media literacy is? yeah, so People often ask this question because it's a sort of a new Concept a new term. I think I coined the term eco-media literacy, but I did not coin the term eco-media Sean Kubit who's a great scholar wrote a book called eco-media in 2004 and I'd mentioned in the introduction that there's an emerging field that It combines some different trends that are happening in academia that many of you probably familiar with so for one does this turn in the materiality In philosophy and media studies people focusing more on the material conditions and material aspects of media They're having the sort of the physical Characteristics and the you know the minerals and all the things that go into making that so when you say eco-media The eco is is part of that sort of ecological turn is the recognition that media Are not separate from the environment are there are they are from the environment, but also about the environment So I think of as two sides of the same coin So on the one hand we have to talk about it in terms of its material characteristics and then the whole system of extraction and Disposal that happens along the commodities chain, but then the discourses and the beliefs and the ideologies that circulate in global media You know through websites popular culture and so forth. So that's how we think about eco-media, but then Eco-media literacy is essentially taking that perspective that critical framework and then applying it to the teaching of media and my background is in media literacy. That's where I come out of so This whole framework actually evolved out of a certain frustration I was experiencing where I've been in media literacy for almost 22 years now when I first started there was very little about the environment and I also did a lot of work in Native American communities and In the early 2000s and I just felt like there was a disconnection between what I was doing in these communities And what the media literacy movement was doing so In my PhD work, which you're very familiar with because you were on my PhD committee, I have this quote full disclosure I Develop this as a response to that and I part of that was I try to understand Why is there no discussion about these issues or very little? I mean, I don't say it was zero It was it was here in pieces Try to Understand what the barriers and opportunities are in the field of media literacy education And I think part of it was this sort of historical belief or Something we inherited in the sort of I think the I would say the ideology of modernity this idea that ideas or sort of belong to the ethers, you know And media belongs to the realm of of thoughts and you know, so you know, we're also very visual cultures We focus on visual characteristics and ideas and textual analysis But we never think about the physicality of the or the materiality of the media No, even with books. We don't think about, you know, how our books made or photography or any of these things so That bias I think in in the western philosophical tradition in academia Was one of the reasons why it had a strong that had a strong influence on media literacy education So people didn't really think about that Well, that's that's a huge synthesis And and so I mean you're bringing together the materiality of media Which makes me think of the history of the book, for example You're bringing together ecological criticism So thinking about the role of all this but then through literacy You you make this general so that I'm if I'm right by by phrasing this in terms of literacy in terms of skills and attitudes That means that everybody can conceivably approach media through this lens We could think about a printed book or we could think about a computer game or we could think about Print magazine that we get or about a Netflix show and start thinking about how well its environmental impact its participation in the Yeah, so the um The the traditional literacies apply something we're going with the audio. Can you can you hear me? I can hear you just fine Okay, there was a I got an echo and then everything kind of went weird like the matrix, you know at a glitch Okay, everything's normal again. There's an update It was your cat, you know, I had a you know, you saw that I saw the cat so we must be in the matrix, right? Okay Inside joke for those of you who follow the film series anyways, um Yeah, so One of the things I talked about in my book I I I have a book out now called eco media literacy was sort of the most updated thinking although I'm even moving past that at this point that I wrote it last year um is that It doesn't take much to tweak what we're already doing It's just expanding just a little to go a little bit more and also sort of bring in some of the the fields that Sometimes are separate. So for example, uh, I'm very much interested in media ecology Although I think that's a big misnomer, but you know, that's the the field of study that's interested in medium Characters to media property But even media ecology doesn't talk about the materiality in the sense of how how is this made? And what is the actual ecological impact of the infrastructure of our entire media system? So just to run it down because I think a lot of people are don't even I'll tell you a little story and then I'll explain it I'll give the overview in 2011 I went to london to a media education conference And I gave a presentation on eco media literacy And only two people came to it next door. There was a something on facebook, which facebook at that time was sort of You know the new phenomena and there was like 150 people there so You know and people are like, well, what is it? What's and people really? Generally do not understand the environmental relationship between media, but it's so ingrained. I mean it's so interrelated that we You'd be surprised So I'll just give you a rundown two minutes and then we'll continue the discussion you have the the the mining and extraction of minerals and resources for energy so oil cold tan gold And so forth, you know, we need these rare earth minerals that our phones use Mostly mined in places like the congo which produce horrible environmental devastation and also wars and you know, very unjust situation. I think everyone here knows conflict minerals And then they're produced in very toxic conditions in countries and assembled in places like china the materials are also shipped all over the world And then e-waste, which is in you know only 13 percent of our devices get Recycled, but they're not even really recycled and if I don't know if anyone's even seen pictures of these recycling sites, you know, you have people Burning, you know cables over fires and breathing all the smoke just to get the copper Or melts melting circuit boards to get the precious metals breathing all this horrible smoke You know people horrible conditions And then but I think the biggest impact is also our server farms and the fact that you know the The the the massive the massive network of servers all over the world requires primarily fossil fuels and currently the you know The so-called cloud you miss as much to to as the aviation industry and that's going to double And then now we're doing ai bitcoin cryptocurrency NFTs and all and and all those Burn servers. I mean you just have to run. Oh, you know, they're using so much power And that's just going to just you know juice up the demand So those are sort of like the major impacts and also electromagnetic frequency. We don't talk about that But that's a form of radiation that impacts wildlife and humans and you know, that's a little bit more controversial But you know in any case, that's one of the impacts Well, that's a that's a really good sketch that That one story just thinking about digital media and tracing that out This is the kind of tracing that people with we're thinking in terms of equal media literacy can really dive into I I have one more question for you And then I want to turn this over to the entire group here The the question is what does this mean for a post-secondary education the world of colleges and universities? Should we consider teaching equal media literacy in our General education requirements or do you foresee departments that specialize in this or does this belong to libraries? But what's our role? Well, I I think First of all, there's a very important role because you know, I teach these classes in a secondary environment And this is you know, one of the places where you can really concentrate on the subject But I think the librarians of course Can well hopefully my website will be helpful for librarians because I'm working with libraries to do this but you know My sense is I I actually would not want to see something called eco media departments created necessarily because In the same way that I don't like to be called an environmentalist. I'm a human being and I care about the environment I don't like this being divided off like environmental for this sort of group of people and everyone else. We're all environmentalists We may not be very May not have a very positive or constructive relationship with the environment But we have we do engage the environment You know, what I would like to see is people who teach digital literacy or digital in digital media or whatever Incorporate into their normal curriculum Modules or or just expand it to whenever we say, you know, I'm going to be Litter on how how do you buy it? Well, I also students should know how is it made? And what what are the impacts and also to promote digital citizenship or I'm sorry eco citizenship because Um, you know, a lot of another complaint I would say I have about media literacy in general and this is also a big issue with Education is this thing of uh, I'm sure people have heard the phrase Responsibilization No sort of this neoliberal point of view that it's all the individual users responsibility So like in the case of fake news, it's my responsibility to decide what's real It's not the responsibility of the platforms to be you know to to exercise some sort of responsibility or editorial control and so Likewise, these these industries really need to be regulated and so we need to teach people how the politically I I have a whole aspect of my Of my pedagogy devoted to political ecology because we have to understand what is the economic system that produces these conditions and how What can we do to change it so people have to understand? You know the the the materiality but also the political ecology and how does this system is constructed And and why does apple make its computers this way and what can we do to get them to stop doing conflict minerals? So there's a whole political economy to this Yeah, yeah, I can see well. Thank you for that answer. I can see I could be engaging in in several ways Friends, let me stop talking and interrogating our poor professor Lopez and let me ask you to do the interrogating So if you're new to the forum Just go to the the white strip at the bottom of the screen and either click the raised hand If you want to join us on stage or click the question mark for q&a And already we have one from our kebek kwa a colleague that you've heard Who asks considering that there is a second hand market for physical media books CDs and vinyl How can we encourage the process for digital devices? Well, the problem with that is the Design principle of built-in obsolescence So, you know, I think all of us have a drawer full of old gadgets I have probably five macbooks sitting in my office. I don't know what to do with Because they're not made to be upgradable So, um, I I fully agree that we should have that. I mean I have a fair phone I don't know if you guys have heard of the fair phone But it's like lego. It looks like lego's you can they send you a screwdriver. You can unscrew it You can replace parts And there are some companies now or that are building Repairable computers and laptops I can't remember the name. There's a company in the u.s Makes now a laptop that you can repair and upgrade So there there has to be You know the an effort on the part of the tech companies Do not just like make everything obsolete every six months because you know, I mean if you want to be like a full-on geek and and sort of Recreated an old, you know Commodore 64 You know great, you know, that's fine, but not all of us have the time to do that And I can tinker and do all that those kind of things So they have to make it easier for us to be able to fix and repair things. So that I think that will be a very important step Well, that's great. Um, so again, uh, matthew. Thank you for the for the good question and uh Professor Lopez, how much does the fair phone cost these days? Uh, there's different models. I think like I have the fair phone. I think this is the four Yeah cost about 400 euros, but Um, when I this is my second one when I returned my old one, they gave me 40 euros credit They also sent me a return label So that I could just put in a box Tended to the post office to the netherlands where they recycled everything And they even took all my other old phones and you know, it's quite Really nice Oh, that's terrific. Thank you. I remember when they launched and I was really intrigued by it and uh, I I've lost track But but this sounds this sounds really really good Also, one one one thing I would add is that no, there is a push There's a couple things that governments could do one is that they should they could force tech companies to make a three-year guarantee on their products And another one is they could do this thing like a take-back program So that they're forced to take back their e-waste and if they did that they would be more responsible To like if so something I think there's even a law in italy So if it's actually made in italy they have to take it back and they have to process and do something like that So that you know, there should be laws instituted that force the industry to behave like this because otherwise I don't know if they will In the chat, uh, people have chimed in. Uh, Roxanne shared the homepage for it. Uh, Matteo seconds the right to repair movement Yeah, yeah, I don't want that to happen. Um, and, um John Zen points out that he's stuck with the 3g technology and it is a almost like an old car and there's no way to upgrade it But it should be a simple chip replacement. But basically he has to find a way to power for it. Yeah, exactly Well, um, let me uh, let me just again through this through the floor open, uh for more questions and comments You've you've clearly struck a nerve with our or their community And here's one that comes from charles finley at the northeastern university Who come a question that goes right to my heart here. Uh, he asks What is the balance for us here on the forum? Do we shut down the forum or continue the discussion about the impact on the environment? Well, that's a great question and people often ask this and my sense is that We have to use what's available. So we have to take advantage of the fact that we can connect and you know, I think if we just um Let me let me bring up the issue of ludditism because there's sort of a misunderstanding. I'm sure everyone's heard the term luddite Uh, or neo luddite and you know, uh, quite often when you criticize technology one of the One of the flak or the feedback you can get people like oh, you're just a luddite You want to go back to you know primitive times? And I think people misunderstand what the luddites were they were not anti technology What they were against was their lives being taken over and destroyed by technology So if I think we have to use what we have to improve our lives and improve what we're doing And to also, you know to push back as much as possible. And I think we just have to Take advantage of the fact that we're able To meet and to discuss this and try to find a way and try to find solutions If we all just abandon these technologies We wouldn't be able to do that. So I think we have better chance of changing things If we leverage what has already been produced Then to just reject it all outright. It's a very practical attitude Charlie, thank you for the question which was lurking in my own heart And thank you for that very practical pragmatic response Professor Lopez we have In the in the chat Jordan Davis a student of mine mentions that we discussed The luddite movement in our class this fall. In fact, we played a role-playing game on the luddite rebellion in manchester In jordan, it was a terrific player But the let me invite everybody else to pose more questions. Can I just say one thing? About role-playing, you know So one of the one of the areas one of the sort of places that i'm bridging into is education for sustainability Which doesn't do much on media. So once I'm kind of in this weird netherworld because the Environmental education people don't talk about media and the media education people don't talk about the environment But um, you know a lot of environmental education people value role-playing And games as a very valuable tool to teach and I have a colleague. She's a media literacy educator Teresa redmond. I don't know if she's here. Probably not but She does a role-playing in her class where the students have to negotiate like They have to imagine what a fair production system would look like and their role play how how that how to put that into existence That that is very very constructive I would I would love to see that if you can if you couldn't share any information about that I would love to see that Sure. Yeah, I don't have the lessons, but I would that was something I'll put on my website on the eco media literacy website Uh, you said that was Teresa redmond. Yeah Uh in the chat, uh, joece alburn says she knows that Teresa redmond at appalachian state university. Yeah, that's her That's her yep Joyce you have to introduce us Joyce is a is a marvelous person a scholar and a librarian um at uh recently at uh appalachian state Great, yeah And so we have a couple of raised hands. Let me just bring people up and speaking of which, uh, let me see if Joyce is up Joyce we need your camera on can we can you uh, can you activate that or are you only on audio? I'm trying to activate it. Hang on Okay, I mean it looks like she didn't exchange a little since last time I was here I'll just talk to you. Yeah, um, um, I used to work at app state and treason. I've done some projects together I was a library dean and other things there and she she's A very creative educator and very inquisitive about all of these areas um, and so yeah, ryan will definitely try to introduce you and Might be a good forum guest to talk about whatever's been going on and And in the education area and to supplement what uh, antonio has been talking about which has been marvelous. Thank you Yeah, and just thank you and tressa Is a very arts-based media educator So she does journaling a lot of really interesting stuff. She'd be a good guest and she and I Co-present quite a bit in co-author articles. So yeah, she's very fluid fluent in this The material that we're talking about today Oh, very nice. Thank you. Joyce. Thank you very much If you're uh, if you're new to the forum by the way, those are examples of both the text question and the video question Um, and so you you can just use either of those to uh, to share your thoughts um, in fact, uh, Plumman, uh, mittenoff has to comment with the raging layoffs of faculty humanities disciplines At his campus the department of faculty I'm curious how stem faculty can be convinced to interview such ideas as eco media literacy in their curricula If the humanities in general will have been shunned And a lot of this does feel humanities oriented with a bit of the social sciences What's the what's the role of stem faculty and stem departments? Well, um, I think it's an important role and if you explore a bit about environmental humanities They're um, very much in collaboration with stem And um, I think that you know, uh, I have a class I'm teaching now called media in the environment and today I was doing an introduction to eco criticism and eco criticism Has sort of three legs if you could say one is sort of the the critic the critique of Of rhetoric that comes out of literature studies and in humanities Um, and then the other leg is science, you know, that you have your base in the scientific analysis and understanding of environmental systems And the third one is political activism that the sort of a starting point that If you're not neutral, so this is not a neutral field to be in for example, environmental communication is a field that sort of came out of science communication, uh in the in the early odds where Scientists were trying to like science or not as you probably know, not the most best communicators about like trying to talk to the general public about their particular field So environmental communication sort of combines elements of media studies journalism studies and science communication now it's a full blown field unto itself And um, and so they're they're very much sort of kind of in that bridge But they they also self identify as what they call themselves a crisis discipline No, they they the starting point is that this is a crisis And we are we are designing our research in our curriculum to solve these these problems But you know, I I think it is a challenge what is happening institutionally in terms of how universities Are sort of changing their curriculum But I think you know, I don't my university doesn't really have a STEM program So I don't interact so much with people at least in my in my area But I think that there's a hunger to to collaborate because One of the things that environmental humanities talks about is how important it is for science to be communicated and to be expressed through sort of creative means and I think one way maybe to bridge these topics is like The digital humanities can can be very much. I think there could be an environmental digital humanity Where you're sort of taking these tools of digital humanities But also, you know translating data translating information into graphics into ways of understanding the world And so that I think that that is something that we could look forward to Oh terrific. Um, and uh, very very good. You bring together so much so many different strands of thinking I'm I'm very very impressed with this We have another video question that's coming up from our long-term wonderful friend Roxanne Rizkin. Let's bring Roxanne up on stage In effect, uh, in order of Roxanne, I'm going to give us the dramatic close-up display check this I am so happy to be here, Ryan. I'm so happy to see you. Um, Thank you for taking my question, Antonia it has to do with Instructional designers and learning experience designers who are Pretty adept at using media and technology tools and what is the implication for us as designers on how we Pick certain technologies to use because right now we're on zoom, which is consuming bandwidth and we With our microphones. We have these physical devices that that may have come from countries China, Africa, and things that mine these very important resources in a very unethical and very inhumane way and I also want to compliment that you use mindfulness and used a buddhist reference in one of your webinars because i'm a Educator and I thought that was really powerful and it really impacted me to continue to Use these things you mentioned that you used it as an example in k through 12 education You held up a piece of paper and one of your samples. I remember that one was excellent and also, can you talk um briefly about the lithium ion the lithium ion farms That we have exploding all over the world and and are the intention that we should have to bring Our awareness to what's happening with these self-driving cars and the newer technologies You mentioned bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and things like that but can you talk a little bit about those car the ion car the um cars and How we can how I think there's a new type of technology Right now being developed to replace that lithium ion You mean the batteries? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. Thank you Yeah, so I think there's three questions here The first one the first one I think is Actually easy to resolve You mentioned like the paper exercise that I do which is you know the from buddhism Which is like that the the teacher would ask do you see the clouds in the paper? And usually people will say well clouds are white the paper's white But the answer is that the paper's organic matter and the paper Is part of the clouds because the clouds produce the rain which grows with the plants or the trees that make the paper And then I do that with a phone. I say, you know, do you see the clouds in the phone? So I think that you You know with your instructional technologies He constructs the technology you're teaching with you know use that as the tool and have the students like well How are we able to have this conversation physics like what's the what is the materiality? What are the systems that are enable us to have this another question you can ask So I'm now I've been focusing more lately in my interest in understanding the history of energy By the way, there's an energy humanities, which is fascinating. Which is about the cultural aspects of energy and energy development and No, we live in a fossil fuel culture and I asked the students name everything in this room that Is made possible because of fossil fuels, you know, and just like go through that So so there's that now the second the thing about mindfulness so In I use this circular diagram Where so the kind of analysis I do of media what I call media objects And there's the cultural aspects. There's the political ecology. There's the eco materiality And then there's the life world the life world Is the physiological impact of our devices on us? And we we are an environment our brain our cognition is part of an environment So we have to be aware of that and so I explore that in different ways One is the fact that all media starts as nerve stimulus Sound and light are physical. They touch us. There are our brains Are responding to actually being stimulated and that these things stimulate us and they get us addicted. They're designed by I think everyone here probably knows this that, you know, people who design spot machines design these phones And we use the same techniques to keep us addicted and to stimulate our endorphins and all that That's why we keep checking our phones And so mindfulness is an important tool to um to be aware of how you know of our addiction but also our cognitive responses to things To be also environmental educators are very concerned about our sense of place and space And to think about you know, how much do our devices remove us from our local environment? And how can we bring the local environment back into um our awareness And then the last issue about lithium Is that yeah, we can't have a clean economy And replace the current economy with the clean economy And still practice neocolonialism. I mean, we you know the the lithium that they need for all these It's a massive extraction hall that they're going to have to do A lot of these minerals are coming out of the andes and chile in argentina and bolivia horrible You know working conditions There was a coolant bolivia a few years ago that everyone pretty much agrees was because of The provians wanted I mean the bolivians wanted to take control of the lithium Even elon musk said we'll coo where we want in twitter, you know, which is kind of a weird cell phone And I don't know why he would like to admit that but i'm not saying this is a conspiracy elon musk engineered to coo in bolivia, but the interest you know, like putting in right-wing military dictatorship in countries where the resources they need for these devices Is convenient and if those of you saw don't look up you might recall that they divert I'm sorry spoiler alert plug your ears for a second They want to divert the comet from destroying the earth instead of diverting it They want to break it up so they can extract your minerals from it for for their devices and there's a sort of evil character who's kind of a hybrid of bezos and elon musk and you know, so By the way, there's a name for this. It's called eco modernism. It's this idea that you can There's a there's a kind of an old phrase and coming out of the environmental and ecological thinking which is You can't solve the problem. You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created the problem So a lot of these eco modernists like bill gates and I think this might ruffle some feathers. I don't know but eco modernists Want to solve the problems that were created by technology with technology So we have to have a different kind of thinking we can't just say replace one colonialism with another colonialism And so if they're inventing new technologies that don't require lithium I I hear every once in a while, you know, there's water batteries is this and that I'm sure we'll come up with something at some point But under the current systems lithium is is what we use and so that's going to have a huge impact on the environment. Hopefully We can find a better way Excuse me, um So and I just want to point out that I'm wearing below in favor of tom's below our own ryan Thank you Participants in the forum that might get that sorry If I didn't include you in that but there's one participant that oh has this awesome blue room That's correct. So thank you. We're great question. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Antonia Yeah, thank you for that answer. Uh, you're really covering a lot of ground I have to be an integrative thinker with this kind of material We really are I've been tweeting out the different concepts you've been mentioning so far and this is really a grand synthesis Which is uh, uh, which is very very important Uh, to put another way. It's a way in to a lot of these different Um, I have more questions, but better yet people in the forum have more questions So here's one from whorehead at uh, george wash at surrey at my colleague at georgetown Uh, and he says thank you for introducing antonio. He synthesizes two of long interests I would like to ask about a third related space international and intercultural education in light of his e-committee of respect Hmm good question. Yeah, so Um, this is difficult to uh, to simplify, but let me put it this way Part of the important influence that I had from working in native american communities And one of the things that helped me understand that, you know, western thinking Is is just one way of seeing the world and you know, we in academia And in sort of our intellectual environment have a certain kind of scientific tradition that we are a part of And there's a lot of new, um Material coming out of uh, in particular south america about cosmologies That are recognized that, you know, everything is alive, you know When I worked in native communities native american communities and I was doing video Bratcher's video work with youth Um, you know, the elders would say don't point the camera at that rock And I and that didn't make sense to me as sort of a westernized, you know individual Uh, but it's because the rock is sacred and you can't film it. You can't objectify it with with media You have to respect it for what it is because the rock has its own Needs in its own perspective and this is not something that we would accept in our in our our reality But in a native american, uh cosmology And I don't want to generalize because all all native communities are are diverse and different languages, etc, etc but, um, there's sort of like, um, uh, a different world view which the everything is alive Which we don't have in the in our western epistemology so one of the things that I am Exploring a bit more that I'm interested in is the concept of epistemological enclosure the fact that We sort of in our western scientific tradition have excluded these world views And you know native, uh indigenous people occupy 80 percent of the biodiversity on earth And it's they're the ones who are gonna, uh, save us in the sense that they're preserving the knowledge We need to to survive this, uh, environmental crisis And we have to be open to the cosmology Of of different world views and we can't just say that the western idea of you know, like the immaterial, uh instrumental use of the earth is the only way that maybe the earth has, you know, that That the forest and the animals and everything have, uh, our entities that deserve rights and things like that And I think we have to shift our our world view and as westerners it's kind of hard for us to accept that but I'll just give one quick example when I was in graduate school and I started taking some anthropology classes there was a, um Pretty famous anthropologist that I took a class from telling a story of how this He was in Central America and there was this, uh, Mayan individual talking about That he'd been he was talking to a bird and the professor said and we all know that no one can talk to birds I'll say wait, wait a second. How do you know that? Have you ever tried? Have you ever talked to a bird? You can't say that you can't and I know lots of people who could talk to animals So that that's sort of kind of arrogance. Like well, of course, you can't talk to Is it's sort of a rejection and and an example of the sort of epistemological enclosure where he's he's outright Assuming from his worldview that the worldview of that person Is not possible And I think some of you might even know about this idea of the weird. Have you heard of this? This is great. So I I'll share this with you. This is really very much aligned with the intercultural communications. Please So You can look this up. Um We are not the weird or we are the weird Um, weird stands for western industrial educated rich democratic, I think Yeah, and so there was these uh, a psychologist a graduate psychology Student in south america. I'm not sure what country was. I think it was in uh, bolivia or peru and I guess there's a standard Game that they play as part of the psychological Or to do their research And there's a certain way that people are supposed to respond I I think you know something along the lines of the prisoners dilemma. I don't I don't think it was that exactly There's something like that And these this community was just was not doing responding the way that they were supposed to according to the matrix Or the the rubric or whatever and so I thought oh, maybe I'm doing it wrong I'll do it again and he tried and same thing happened and then he said well, maybe it's just this community So he went to this other community in the area same thing happened And something kind of clicked in his mind. It's like maybe the experiment is wrong And so he in some and some other graduate students Had this brilliant idea to study like they look at the last 20 or 30 years of psychological research And they want to understand who have been the subject of this research And guess what the the typical subject of a psychological study is a college student at a university in a western world Because that's who you have access to so turn out like 90 or 90 Very high number of these studies 90 percent the research subjects were were western subjects And and and belonging to universities that and they're from the western world And it's a very skewed Sample even though but that would all these psychological theories were based on that And so, you know the conclusion was it's like you you study penguins to understand parrot It's like you you you cannot generalize about other cultures of the societies if all your research subjects are a very narrow sample So I encourage people to read there's a pacific standard has a great article about to sort of overview the research It's very fascinating So i've been very interested in that because I experienced that firsthand working in Native American communities And also the other thing Related to media literacy is that so much media literacy is so individualized It's about developing individual like social. I'm sorry. Uh constructionism, you know, there's typical These are the education philosophies about the individual constructing your own knowledge And Native communities that doesn't work because they don't have They're they're communal society And also a lot of Asian societies are very similar. So, you know, it's like Um, for example, you've heard the Japanese phrase, you know, the the nail that sticks up gets hammered down And what I learned from working with Native students you talk to them And they're listening and they're they're involved, but you ask a question and no one answers It's not because they don't know the answer But they don't want to speak the answer because they don't want to embarrass someone else that might not know the answer That's a different sort of cultural reality It's it's communal knowledge. You can't have an individual. No one person can know the one thing Everyone has to know it together We even have this problem problem in Italy over cheating because it in it in italian students Share their the answers to the exams because they think it's their their responsibility is As community members if they know the correct answer, they should share it with other people And americans are all based on merit individualism And so we have this constant conflict in our classes between italians and americans Because italians americans think italians are cheating and italians just think they're being generous There's there's there's a there's a lot there Plum and Milton off mentions in the chat of my way to this event. I was listening to a podcast on ants They don't have brains, but they can do things as a collective that we humans cannot do Have you read the ametal of ghost's new book the nutmegs curse No, but I heard a interview with him about it and it was amazing But that I think the way that He talks about the nutmeg tree is exactly how media eco media literacy works He takes, you know that that the nutmeg as as sort of Follows the whole history of that and how it fits into the history of the culture of indonesia But also the history of colonialism I mean, I haven't read the book. I'm just going off the interview And that kind of that's the kind of integrative thinking that we need to do with our our technology Well, that's that's quite right and and he ends with a passionate call for a kind of animism or vitalism That we make sure that we give nature and the the non-human world Voices and listen to it Does that is eco media literacy a decolonizing literacy? Yeah, absolutely um In fact, yeah, I have a whole chapter in my book about that and I I do I have a very lengthy discussion about the Anthropocene as a colonial concept because the Anthropocene has comes out of geology and geology Is it I'm oversimplifying. I'm not saying all geologists do this but geology is a is a child or a product of colonialism in certain respects because It was the geologists that were evaluating and determining the value of of minerals for the process of extraction and you know, the whole science was sort of We could say in parallel at least with colonialism And then it's geologists the geologists that came up with the concept of the Anthropocene And the critique of that the sort of postcolonial or decolonial critique Of the Anthropocene is that the Anthropocene kind of argues that humans will be humans that you know What's going on to the earth is because humans just this is what humans do And people say no, wait a second. It's a very small percentage of the population that's doing this Not only that it's a system that's doing this and you can't blame everyone for the behavior of a fraction of the population and in fact Eco justice, which is very much concerned with like a just transition to future energy. This goes back to the issue of lithium argues that you When you try to solve environmental problems, you can't treat everyone the same way you have to You know, you have to first of all identify who are the main polluters for the main Who are the people that are really causing this problem? And they're the ones who really have to pay for it. And they're the ones that need to like To take responsibility. You can't you know, the people for getting flooded out in Bangladesh Are not the ones who you know, who who are causing the The rise in the seas So is that would that be I'm thinking of a learner who was thinking in terms of eco-media literacy. They go to a theater. They see a movie And they will identify the materiality of it, you know the projector The literal film or the digital cassette You know, they'll think about the construction materials that went into this But they'll also be thinking about the the small number that are responsible for this Perhaps the realtor her owns the land and the physical building perhaps the owners of the studio that made the film That'd be right That would be part of it. That would be I would say half of it And then the other half is what are the ideologies and discourses that are Communicated through the film that reinforce certain belief systems that are Sort of part of the problem so to speak or part of the solution I I should emphasize there's a lot of really great media That are helping and they are part of this solution. You can't solve this without the media But you know, uh, that's one thing that I love about the ecocinema class Is that we study the history of film the history of film In some ways is a propaganda system for fossil fuel culture if you think of the way that You know car culture and technologies of like crashes and explosions and all these things that give us excitement and fun Um, and it produces these sort of spectacles of destruction and violence Kind of normalize it and make it okay and even a film like Deepwater horizon, which is you know, conceivably about an ecological disaster Completely focused on the human drama and doesn't really identify it doesn't talk about or raise the issue of like Why are we drilling out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico in the deepest part of the sea? Why do we have thousands of these oil platforms that are leaking all the time that are not, you know for going back to 1950s So that that film sort of takes away I it does, you know, it does Criticize the company a little bit for not paying attention to safety But it doesn't ever really get drilled down to critique the whole system It's not the job of every media to do that But it's important for us to recognize also in the in the discourses I'll give you another example because I just taught this in my class I think a lot of you might know the crying Indian ads from the 1970s No, and remember this that he's the Indians in the canoe and then he comes out and there's like all these smoke Sacks and car drives by and they fill garbage out the window and And then he's he there's a tear in his eye and it says People cause pollution and people can stop pollution And on the surface that seems like wow, that's a powerful environmental message But in fact that was produced by the plastics industry to take away the uh to stop the critique of of of industry From the environmentalists and to blame individuals if it's the individual's fault for doing that It's not the industry. It's not the industry that is doing it And not only that then it also Sort of uses it reinforces this idea that only Native Americans are ecological and everyone else is not ecological And I I want to move away from that. We're all ecological It happens that you know native indigenous people are historically more closely associated with ecology, but not there's a lot of Indigenous people who destroy the environment as well. We don't want to stereotype But I would certainly say that the worldview of most Indigenous people is more conducive and more aware and more sensitive to Healing and taking care. I mean the red nation I don't know if anyone here has heard of the red deal. I know we're almost out of time, but I'll Try to be faster The red deal is a critique of the green new deal from a native point of Native American point of view And it's sort of a kind of a radical critique is quite good. It's a short book. I recommend it And they they what they what they talk about is that we have and This goes back to eco-media literacy. One of the things that comes out of eco-media studies Is to think of media as an infrastructure Don't think of it as just a film or a tv show or a newspaper article But it's an entire infrastructure. So one sort of emerging definitions of media is that media are infrastructures of Communications something like that So they talk about like art that we use the phrase critical infrastructure quite a bit You hear it like in in policy debates like a build back better build things like that Critical infrastructure often has is related to pipelines and you know sort of things that make our society run And they say like well rather than a critical infrastructure. We need an infrastructure relation So the so the critical infrastructure is based on sort of greed and destruction like that's the that's the fundamental ethic of that kind of a system A infrastructure of relations is based on Care and being a good relation and be or being a good relative and being a good relative means being a good relative To the more than human world to each other, but also to the future Intergenerational justice, you know the future generations that we leave the place In uh for the future the way that we you know, we benefited from it We have to make sure other people in the future can do that. So it's a different mode of thought It's it's a completely different ethical system that we're not, you know, it's not what we're a part of We have to transition into that kind of way of thinking Oh speaking of a transition, um We're I I have time for one quick quick question for you And thank you. This is this is a torrent of ideas and I've been tweeting I'm putting some in the chat. What what is a given university or college look like if they embrace Eco-media literacy and and do that for say 10 years. How does that campus? How is it different? Wow You know, honestly, I had not put that into I haven't thought that through but if I was gonna First of all, I would develop I would change the curriculum so that you're not You're not having all these different silos that everything You know that you would have a lot more interdisciplinarity And that the science and humanities would be more Sort of integrated I would also have mindfulness, you know, that should be a part of it But you know, I I think I would Structure the curriculum. I mean if I think about what I want my students to be able to do I'm teaching a class right now. I have a bunch of visiting students By the way, I you mentioned someone from northeastern We have students from northeastern that do like you got about 150 of them in the fall We we um, so I have students that are actually environmental studies majors in my class We don't have it at my university, but they're from their university And it's great because when I introduce an idea, they're like there they're on it. They get it They they they're the environmental studies As I mentioned at the beginning of our presentation Is, you know in the sciences in the humanities in the social science and when when you have someone that's equally balanced in those These ideas move much more fluidly So these students like they're my now they're my research assistants because they get it. No, they're just on it They just know it is amazing. It's so great But the students that are just sort of stuck only in humanities or in the social science They're they don't have that integrative thinking so I would definitely balance the curriculum much more Also, I would move away from this paradigm that everything has to be about business and marketing. I just you know That's driving me nuts And and to teach more about eco citizenship and to help students We you know, I think this is a big problem for media literacy I'll just leave everyone everyone with this if you work in digital literacy or eco or media literacy Is to it's important for individuals to be able to Read and deconstruct a text. I'm not denying that skill, you know information literacy on that level is absolutely important But we can't just do that. It's not just up to the individual We have to teach people how these systems work and we have to teach them to be active eco citizens So they can change the laws or put pressure on the companies to stop behaving the way they have to behave because They're not going to change unless we we change them So I just think that the the literacy that we're lacking is the literacy of the materiality But also the political literacy of how do you change the system? What a great vision to to conclude on uh professor Lopez. This is an astonishing work that you're doing You sound like a a one-person army I need help. Please help me. Well, I I always ask guests how we can keep up with you and I think your eco media literacy website is one way And we've been tweeting at you. So that might be another way. That would be nice. I'm sure when I go to twitter I'll have a bunch of Notices. Yeah, I mean, um, I post updates on twitter Um, and I think you know a certain point When I I what I what I'm going to need in the coming year Is I'm applying for a grant to I need to program a little module in this wordpress site To create a form so people can create lessons And what I need people to do is to create lessons and test the system and then also to to go to eco media literacy And really I would like you to go with your zen minds or your child mind. Whatever you want to call it And just say like Okay, this is what I need there's something I want And does this website have it and you go and you can't find it you need you should tell me About the design of it the wordings, you know, if it's confusing More people who try to Find resources and use this the better it's gonna it's gonna help me We're sort of in a beta phase and so and I haven't even because I'm waiting to get this program This little module. I haven't really announced anything yet But I certainly will put it out in twitter that to please come create a lesson or try a lesson that's been put on there and you know The acrl framework. I have some librarians that drama call that i'm going to work with I really want to see I think you can green acrl very easily just take you know that framework and and use as a subject as the subject matter you feel media literacy and just You know, I would love people to start doing that to trying that out Well, I think let us know when that goes live and and and and and we'll be delighted to share that Thank you so much. This has been a terrific terrific discussion. And wait, let's just quick clarification You can be a literacy site. You can use it now. You can access it now It's just not it's not ready for the for the level that I want it to be at So it is live so but I'll let you know when it's really like that tool is available for you to use And your your twitter handle is media ecology, right? Media ecology all one word It's in the chat now Thank you so much. This has been a real real pleasure. Good luck with this work and we'll be in touch to see how it goes And help out. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you for everyone's questions. They were fantastic Take care, but don't leave everybody. I just want to point out where we're headed in the next few minutes or the next few weeks First of all next week is our sixth anniversary Woo, so be sure to come bring friends and we'll have a lot of fun and And celebrate and a lot of thinking we have other topics coming up Including more on the climate crisis libraries and careers minority students on campus public higher education and web three If you'd like to keep talking about these issues of decolonialization and materiality Under Eco-media literacy You can throw things at our blog at bryanaldzander.org or you could tweet at us at bryanaldzander or at shindig events Just use the hashtag ftte If you'd like to go back into the past into our archive and look for some previous sessions to discuss this Just go to tinyorl.com slash ftfr archive Thank you all for the really thoughtful questions and consideration. This has been a really really rich discussion I'm really grateful to be able to think and talk about all these issues with you. Good luck with your work This last end of winter if as it will hope to see you next week Work hard. Take care. Be safe. We'll see you online Bye. Bye