Greenwashing the State: A Roundtable on Media and Ecofascism

The term “ecofascism” encompasses a broad range of discourses that link ideas of the environment and nature to concerns around national belonging, reproduction, purity, social contagion, and more. Today, ecofascist ideas are pervasive and growing, as environmental imaginaries are increasingly recruited into contestations over population growth, deportation, eugenics, and other forms of violence that dovetail with fascist worldviews.

This roundtable event will ask how scholars might define, think with, and disrupt ecofascism as an emergent political genre. This conversation about media and ecofascism will feature three Pitzer faculty, Maria Paz Almenara, Debbie Duarte, and Eduard Fanthome in conversation with two invited guest scholars, Diana Flores Ruíz (University of Washington) and Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa (Seattle University) who conduct research on these themes.

Diana Flores Ruíz is a feminist media scholar who studies the sociotechnical infrastructures of bordering regimes, inclusive of detention and deportation, and how artists and activists counter or remediate border technologies. Through the support of a Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship, Dr. Ruíz is completing her first book manuscript, which provides an analytic framework for understanding enduring forms of carceral visual technosolutionism along the US-Mexico border and weaves in oppositional modes of resistance through studies of abolitionist aesthetic practices. Her writing appears in Feminist Media Histories, Critical Ethnic Studies, Film Quarterly, and the Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, among other venues. Dr. Ruíz is Assistant Professor of Race and Media in the department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington, where she also holds affiliate faculty appointments in the departments of Human Centered Design & Engineering, Comparative Histories of Ideas, and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies.

Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Seattle University. His research focuses on the history of scientific filmmaking, nontheatrical film, and animal studies. Among other venues, his writing has been published in JCMS, Film History, and Journal of Environmental Media. His book The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (University of California Press) was published in 2023. He is currently working on two other book projects, tentatively titled Against Encounter: The Problem of Organicism in Animal Documentary and Beastly Futures: Rightwing Animal Aesthetics in the 21st Century.

The roundtable is open to the Claremont Colleges community. This event was supported by the Teaching, Learning, and Campus Life Committee.