Extreme Weather and Global Media

In the two decades bracketing the turn of the millennium, large-scale weather disasters have been inevitably constructed as media events. As such, they challenge the meaning of concepts such as identity and citizenship for both locally affected populations and widespread spectator communities. This timely collection pinpoints the features of an often overlooked yet rapidly expanding category of global media and analyzes both its forms and functions. Specifically, contributors argue that the intense promotion and consumption of 'extreme weather' events takes up the slack for the public conversations society is not having about the environment, and the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies the realization that anthropogenic climate change has now reached a point of no return. Incorporating a range of case studies of extreme weather mediation in India, the UK, Germany, Sweden, the US, and Japan, and exploring recent and ongoing disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, the Fukushima nuclear crisis, flooding in Germany, and heat waves in the UK, Extreme Weather and Global Media generates valuable inquiry into the representational and social characteristics of the new culture of extreme weather.

Julia Leyda is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo. She has published articles inJump Cut, Television and New Media, American Quarterly, and Cinema Journal. She is the editor of Todd Haynes: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin. She is the author, editor or co-editor of eight books, the most recent of which isGendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Duke University Press, 2014). She is co-editor ofTelevision and New Media.