Landscapes That Speak

Terrain, Threshold, and Transformation Across Cinema and Culture
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-21756-1
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan

Buch, Englisch, 218 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 384 g

This book invites readers to see landscapes differently. It reconceptualises landscape as an active cultural force: something that remembers, resists, and transforms alongside the humans and non-humans that move through it. Across film, television, myth, and lived environments, landscapes emerge as sites where imagination, extraction, belief, and survival collide.

Organised around four interwoven lenses—liminal landscapes, landscapes as wonderland, mythical terrains, and toxic and extractive environments—the book moves fluidly across disciplines, drawing on film and television studies, cultural geography, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and critical theory. Each chapter pairs conceptual clarity with richly textured case studies, ranging from ancient sacred groves and Indigenous conceptualisations of Country to digitally augmented worlds, industrial ruins, and post-extraction wastelands. These examples do more than illustrate ideas: they demonstrate how landscapes actively produce meaning, affect, and power, with tangible social and political consequences.

Grounded in contemporary debates in posthumanism, multispecies thinking, and critical ecological theory, the book offers a new vocabulary for understanding landscape as aesthetic form, ecological assemblage, and contested political terrain. It unsettles inherited binaries—nature and culture, human and non-human, sacred and profane—revealing instead dense networks of relation, care, violence, and memory. In doing so, it speaks directly to urgent questions about climate crisis, environmental justice, and the cultural work of screen media.

Bold, accessible, and theoretically ambitious, it makes a compelling case for why landscapes matter—not only as places we inhabit or represent, but as forces that shape how we imagine the past, negotiate the present, and confront the futures we are making.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Coghlan, Jo

Nolan, Huw

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Soziale & wirtschaftliche Auswirkungen von Umweltfaktoren
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. Terrain, Threshold, Transformation: Screened and Lived Landscapes that Speak.- Chapter 2. Liminal Landscapes: Spaces of Suspension, Instability, and Becoming.- Chapter 3. Through the Looking Glass: Wonderland Landscapes, Uncanny Encounters, and Hyperreal Terrains.- Chapter 4. Myth in the Landscapes Bones: Landscapes of Mind and Meaning.- Chapter 5. Contaminated Grounds and the Ecologies of Toxic Modernity.- Chapter 6. Extraction Landscapes and Petro-Cultures.- Chapter 7. Reading the Land: Memory, Power, and Multispecies Futures – A Concluding Invitation.

Über Autor(innen)

Jo Coghlan is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work examines film, television, and popular culture through their affective, material, and political dimensions, using screen media and everyday artefacts to analyse vernacular histories, lived cultures, and the landscapes that give them meaning.

Huw Nolan is an animal welfare scientist and ethicist whose research bridges science, ethics, and popular culture, exploring how imagination and belief shape human relationships with animals and environments, particularly through media representation.