Research Groups

Carsey-Wolf Center (CWC) – Environmental Media Initiative

Current Projects and Collaborations

CWC/ DigitalOcean – Sampling the Sea: Fostering discussion of fisheries problems among a global population of young fish consumers, offering better information about links between fish consumption and production, allowing better consumption choices by students.

CWC/ DigitalOcean – Early  Career Ocean Scientist Network (ECOSNET): Developing a social network for ocean science, speeding up science result communication, improving international collaborations, building better policy support.

CWC/ DigitalOcean – Ocean Acidification Research Network: Bringing the network effects of DO to this vital research effort, supporting global discussions on the impacts of climate change on ocean chemistry, developing a platform for micro-article publication and data registration.

CWC/ DigitalOcean – Marine Protected Areas (MPAs): ECOSnet Groups solving common MPA problems, creating vast MPA Google Ocean content for public awareness, sharing data to discover common solutions, improving management of MPA efforts.

Individuals ( * indicates participation in the Environmental Media Initiative)

Celia Alario
Environmental Studies

Celia Alario is a communications strategist, facilitator, coach, spokesperson trainer and educator. She takes one quarter off from her professional career each year to offer courses at UCSB, in the Environmental Studies Department and at the Bren School for Environmental Science and Management. During the rest of the year, she cavorts with grassroots change agents, artists, academics and journalists who share her love for social justice, planetary healing and culture shaping. Alario is currently engaging in research of best practices in participatory communications strategy development among social movement practitioners. She is also part of a national team looking at leveraging popular culture to embed social justice and environmental values and catalyze behavior shifts.

Charles Bazerman*
Education

Dr. Bazerman is interested in the practice and teaching of writing, understood in a socio-historic context. Using socially based theories of genre, activity system, interaction, intertextuality, and cognitive development, he investigates the history of scientific writing, other forms of writing used in advancing technological projects, and the relation of writing to the development of disciplines of knowledge. Some of his studies involve the history and organization of environmental knowledge and communication.

Carsey-Wolf Center

Peter Bloom*
Film and Media Studies: French cinema and society

Greg Graves*
Environmental Studies

Dr. Graves’ research interests include public history, California history, environmental history, and U.S. history. He specializes in federal water resources development and resource allocation. He also conducts environmental and historical investigations of industrial sites in the partnership Graves & Neushul Historical Consultants.

Carsey-Wolf Center

Ken Hiltner*
English

Ken Hiltner is a professor of English literature and Environmental Studies. He explores the history of literature and the relationship between literary history and our Earth in order to better understand how we arrived at our current environmental beliefs. Hiltner is active in examining environmental issues from various perspectives. He hosts a weekly podcast, the Environmental Humanities Podcast, where he conducts interviews with scholars and artists to discuss how environmental issues are taken up across the humanities. He also has given various talks, such as “Nature: How Much Does it Matter,” “The Role of Our Past In Our Environmental Future,” and “Environmental Criticism: What is at Stake?”

Lisa Jevbratt*
Art

Lisa Jevbratt a professor in the art department and an artist who has focused her research and art on investigating human/animal relationships for several years. She is developing software that simulates how animals see, and she is teaches a yearly class in interspecies collaboration in the art department. Her work and teaching is continuously engaged with questions about sustainability though examining the relationships we create with other species and our shared environment.

Marko Peljhan*
Art

Professor Peljhan’s research focuses on art and technology. His recent projects involve the Makrolab, a project that focuses on telecommunications, migrations, and weather systems research in an intersection of art and science from 1997-2007, and he is currently coordinating the Arctic Perspective Initiative art/science/tactical media project which is focused on the global significance of the Arctic geopolitical, natural, and cultural spheres.

Carsey-Wolf Center

Amy Propen
Writing

Amy Propen’s research interests include visual and material rhetorics, environmental and sustainability rhetorics, digital and posthuman rhetorics, rhetoric and technical communication as advocacy work, writing in the disciplines, classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, animal studies, human geography, critical cartographies, and critical GIS.

Rice Ronald
Communications

Ronald Rice’s research includes examining environmental communication. He has published articles on elementary school curriculum for ocean sustainability, environmental communication centers and resources, on environmental campaigns (such as bottled water campaigns on campuses), and about visual image use in climate change campaigns. Rice has also helped organize several conferences on campus relating to environmental issues including the Sustainable Science Communication Conference (2015) and Rupe/Figuring Sea Level Rise Conference (2013).

Arthur N. Rupe Chair
International Communication Association

Teresa Shewry*
English

Professor Shewry’s research interests include pacific rim cultures, environmental studies, and oceans and water. She is the director of Literature and the Environment at UCSB. Her recent publications include “Possible Ecologies: Literature, Nature, and Hope in the Pacific” and “Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century.” Professor Shewry is currently co-organizing a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Sea Change: Integrating the Study of Human Cultures and Marine Environments in Three Pacific Regions.”

Carsey-Wolf Institute

David Siegel*
Geography

Dr. Siegel studies interdisciplinary marine science which couples physical, biological, optical, and biogeochemical processes. He has recently worked on collecting large scale ocean data by using ocean color variability from satellites. Differences in color can indicate distinguishing characteristics such as temperature and the overall biochemistry of the water. This data allows scientists to observe long-term trends and better understand the role oceans play in climate change as well as ascertain what marine ecosystems might look like in the future.

Carsey-Wolf Institute
Marine Science Institute

Eric Smith*
Political Science

Professor Smith’s work focuses on U.S. public opinion and political behavior regarding energy and environmental issues. He investigates, for example, public support for or opposition to renewable energy production facilities and offshore oil drilling. He is also working on the problem of how much people know about energy and environmental issues and why people accept or reject factual claims about energy and environmental issues by scientists.

Michael Stohl
Communications

Professor Stohl is current involved in a project entitled: Sustainability at the Crossroads: Examining the Vulnerability of New Zealand’s Global Environmental Positioning. The research project aims to understand how interested parties, including NZ policy makers, media, and business leaders think about, frame, and prioritise environmental, social and economic sustainability issues and with what consequences.

Carsey-Wolf Institute

Janet Walker*
Film and Media StudiesFilm historiography; documentary film; feminism and film theory; trauma and memory; the social ecology of media

Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Environmental Media Initiative. A specialist in documentary film, trauma and memory, and media and environment, her books include Feminism and Documentary(Minnesota University Press, 1999; with Diane Waldman)Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust(University of California Press, 2005), Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2010; with Bhaskar Sarkar) and, most recently, Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (Routledge, 2016; with Nicole Starosielski).

Environmental Media Initiative Research Group
Carsey-Wolf Center