Mechademia Conference on Asian Cultures: Kyoto 2020 "Ecologies"
May 30, 2020 to June 1, 2020. Japan
In the past few decades, media systems have been seen as increasingly complex, interwoven, and global in their scope. One way to approach this complex system is through the growing interdisciplinary discourse of ecology. “Ecology” encompasses a range of concepts that began in the sciences and have spread to the social sciences and humanities. Scholars have discovered that the use of metaphors from environmental ecologies, such as regeneration, symbiosis, precarities, economies, flows, emergences, growths and disintegrations, webs and networks, and mutual dependencies -- create new methods to develop “new taxonomies, new visualizations, and fresh ways of thinking about how culture operates.” In this vein of thought, we may (re)discover the non-human, engage with its dynamism productively.