The Environment in English-language Cinema and Series
2026 SERCIA Conference
02-04 septembre 2026
Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry
Échéance des propositions : 15 avril 2026
Organisé par :
- Guilhem Billaudel
- Anne Crémieux
- Apolline Dosse
- Hadrien Fontanaud
- Hervé Mayer
- David Roche
Contenu de l’appel
Environmental concerns are at the center of the 21st century. They are the object of heated political debates, including from those determined to frame climate change as a belief rather than scientific fact. They have impacted—and continue to do so—our everyday lives, from recycling and composting to solar panels to becoming a vegetarian and/or calculating our carbon footprint on a daily basis thanks to apps like Greenly or Klima. Our emotional lives are deeply affected by the annual reports of rising average temperatures, of polar icecaps melting, of decreasing biodiversity and of increasing natural disasters, giving rise to a new form of depression known as eco-anxiety.
And yet, the dramatization on screen of ecological issues is not new; early documentaries like Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1925), Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934) or more recently the Netflix series Our Planet (2019-2023), as well as later feature films from various genres such as The Roots of Heaven (John Huston, 1958), Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973), The Emerald Forest (John Boorman, 1985), Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Diane Fossey (Michael Apted, 1988) and Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013) already engaged with human interaction and adaptation to their natural environment, as well as issues such as deforestation, the conservation of wildlife and even ecoterrorism. Contemporary film and series have increasingly integrated these concerns in their narratives, some might say, capitalizing on their topicality and affective potential. The premises of science fiction blockbusters such as The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-Ho, 2013), Interstellar (Christophe Nolan, 2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) and Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) are grounded in the potential consequences of climate change. In the British mini-series Years and Years (BBC One, 2019) the passing of time is punctuated with news broadcast on rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events; and the US three-season series The Leftovers (HBO, 2014-2017) has cogently addressed the issue of (the denial of) the anthropocene (Hatchuel & Thiellement, 2019). Such works are, however, bound in a compromising paradox: making a film or a series is not an environmentally friendly affair. In March 2024, Time Magazine reported that “movies can emit on average between 391 metric tons for a small film and up to 3,370 metric tons of CO2 equivalents for large, tentpole productions such as Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) or Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)—that’s the equivalent of powering 656 homes for a year.” While studios and distributors endeavor, like governments, to introduce green measures, it is mainly experimental film and video artists who are striving to create their art while causing the least impact on the environment. SERCIA’s 2026 annual conference aims to tackle this paradox and, more broadly, to foster interdisciplinary conversations between film and television studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism and related fields.
Scholarly interest in the relationship between art and environmental issues has gained momentum since the advent of ecocriticism in the field of literary studies in the 1970s. In 2004 the term ecocinema was coined by film critic Scott MacDonald in a discussion of independent filmmakers such as James Benning. Since then, a number of key publications have seen the day, focusing on the film and television industry’s impact on the environment (Vaughan 2019; Kääpä and Vaughan 2022) as well as on the representation of environmental concerns in popular cinema (Murray and Heumann 2009), in experimental cinema (Rust, Monani and Cubitt 2012; Paszkiewicz and Ruthwein 2025), in specific film genres like comedy (Murray and Heumann 2022) and even in early 20th century films that might be influenced by late 19th century ideas on conservation (Mitman 1999). The field of animal studies has also emerged on the international academic scene, and in France more specifically, efforts have been made in film studies not only to analyze the iconography of animal life (André and Durafour 2023), plant life (Castro, Pitrou and Rebecchi 2020) and “natural forms” (Deville and Olcèse 2023), but also to conceptualize film ecology on theories describing ecosystems.
The conference welcomes research that engages with the environment in cinema and series from a variety of perspectives, including aesthetics, cultural studies, economics, history and sociology. It will understand the term “environment” in its “environmental” sense, thus limiting it to the idea of “natural environment.” Talks can focus on nature, landscapes, environmental justice, ecofeminism, the Anthropocene (Fay 2018), the capitalocene, anthropogenic transformations (climate change, pollution, urbanization), non-human agency and ecologies, but also on the relationship between the natural world and other environments (urban, virtual, etc.).
Possible topics include but are not restricted to the following:
- how cinema and TV represent environmental issues (aesthetics, temporalities, affects and emotions, politics, including the articulation of environmental concerns with race, gender, class, and the non-human);
- the environmental footprint of media (production, streaming, distribution; sustainability practices in filmmaking);
- how audiences understand environmental concerns via screen media (the impact of film and series on beliefs, activism, environmental awareness);
- how specific genres engage with environmental concerns (cli-fi, eco-disaster films, eco-horror, documentaries, etc.);
- how recent scholarship addresses environmental issues as mediated by cinema and television (ecocinema, environmental humanities, ecocritical theory, posthumanism, new materialism, animal studies, environmental justice and postcolonial ecologies) and endeavors to cast them in a historical, intermedial or transnational perspective;
- activism and public engagement in/around screen media (actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, film festivals, courses, using cinema/TV to foster environmental awareness and literacy).
Proposals in English and French, including a 300-word abstract and a short bio, should be sent by April 15, 2026 to sercia2026@gmail.com. We look forward to receiving your proposals and engaging in fruitful debates about how cinema and television not only reflect environmental crises but also help imagine, critique, and possibly reshape ways of understanding our shared environment.
Registration for the conference requires active SERCIA membership: https://www.sercia.net/join/how-to-join-sercia/
Keynote lecturers
- Emmanuelle André (Université Paris-Cité) and Jean-Michel Durafour (Université Aix-Marseille)
- Joe Heumann and Robin L. Murray (Eastern Illinois University)
Organizing committee
- Guilhem Billaudel
- Anne Crémieux
- Apolline Dosse
- Hadrien Fontanaud
- Hervé Mayer
- David Roche
Scientific Committee
- Martine Beugnet (Université Paris Cité)
- Teresa Castro (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
- Claire Cornillon (Université de Nîmes)
- Vincent Deville (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry)
- Christophe Gelly (Université Clermont-Auvergne)
- Sarah Hatchuel (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry)
- Marianne Kac-Vergne (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
- Monica Michlin (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry)
- Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (University of the Balearic Islands)
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Victor Faingnaert (11 mars 2026). Appel à communications – The Environment in English-language Cinema and Series. LPCM. Consulté le 12 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15uvo