Thomas Pringle
Thomas Pringle[email protected]
Year entered: 2014
Thomas Pringle is a Brown Presidential Fellow in the sixth year of the PhD program with Modern Culture and Media. Before arriving in Providence, he received an MA in cultural studies from McGill University where he studied with the Moving Image Research Laboratory and co-founded the mobile media project ‘Cinema out of the Box.’ Thomas has held research fellowships with the SenseLab Montréal at Concordia, the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana, and SSHRC. In 2019, he received the Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction. His research considers historical case studies when media production enlists ecological and technological knowledge to support political ends, like state violence and unjust economic development. Thomas’s dissertation, “The Climate Proxy,” analyzes the regional mediation of global climate change information in documentary film and mass and grassroots digital content, such as online journalism and digital video. He traces how media discourses of sustainability, resilience, vulnerability, and speculation serve the financial and national security cultures of global warming adaptation.
Research Interests: media theory and digital media; documentary studies; scientific imaging, STS, sociology of scientific knowledge; environmental media and infrastructure studies; ecological violence and environmental justice/inequality.
Publications:
Machine. Co-authored with Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler. In Search of Media Series. Series eds. Timon Beyes, Götz Bachmann, Mercedes Bunz, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Lüneburg, Germany and Minneapolis, USA: Meson Press and University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Chapters: “Un/Civil Engineering” and “The Ecosystem is an Apparatus: From Machinic Ecology to the Politics of Resilience.” https://meson.press/books/machine/
“Speculation and Ecological Futures: The ‘Unthinkable’ Challenge in Documenting Climate Change.” The Documentary Moment, Eds. Joshua Malitsky and Patrik Sjoberg. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Forthcoming.
“Emergency/Salvage Archaeology: Excavating Media and Uranium in the Glen Canyon.” Toxic Immanence: Nuclear Legacies, Futures, and the Place of Twenty-First Century Nuclear Environmental Humanities, Eds. Livia Monnet and Peter C. van Wyck. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, Forthcoming.
“Documentary Animism: Material Politics and Sensory Ethics in The Act of Killing (2012).” The Journal of Film and Video, 6-7.3-4 (2015): http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jfilmvideo.67.3-4.0024
“Photographed by the Earth: War and media in light of nuclear events.” NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, 3.2 (2014): https://necsus-ejms.org/photographed-earth-war-media-light-nuclear-events/