front cover of Digital Animalities
Digital Animalities
Mediating Life in an Age of Planetary Domestication
Jody Berland
University of Minnesota Press, 2026

Exploring where animality meets digital media in the shadow of climate crisis

Digital Animalities is a groundbreaking investigation into the entanglements of animal life, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in a time of environmental precarity and digital saturation. Revealing the digital as a dynamic site where animal agency and technological systems collide, the contributors eschew simplistic binaries to emphasize complex mediations between animals and digital media.

From wildlife camera traps and virtual zoos to gaming environments and animation tools, these essays explore how animals are captured, played with, and consumed through digital technologies, elaborating their agency in these mediations of ecological and biopolitical processes. Rethinking animality as a fluid and contested terrain shaped by climate change, extinction pressures, and emerging ecopolitical paradigms, Digital Animalities shifts how we consider the impact of the digital on sentient lives and their futures.

Contributors: Giovanni Aloi, Art Institute of Chicago; Etienne S. Benson, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; Sarah Bezan, U College Cork; Michael Fisch, U of Chicago; Kate Galloway, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Brian McCormack; Jonathan Osborn; Hannah Tollefson, U of Toronto Scarborough; Tom Tyler, U of Leeds; Paul Wells, Loughborough U; Hang Wu.

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front cover of North of Empire
North of Empire
Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space
Jody Berland
Duke University Press, 2009
For nearly two decades, Jody Berland has been a leading voice in cultural studies and the field of communications. In North of Empire, she brings together and reflects on ten of her pioneering essays. Demonstrating the importance of space to understanding culture, Berland investigates how media technologies have shaped locality, territory, landscape, boundary, nature, music, and time. Her analysis begins with the media landscape of Canada, a country that offers a unique perspective for apprehending the power of media technologies to shape subjectivities and everyday lives, and to render territorial borders both more and less meaningful. Canada is a settler nation and world power often dwarfed by the U.S. cultural juggernaut. It possesses a voluminous archive of inquiry on culture, politics, and the technologies of space. Berland revisits this tradition in the context of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary media culture.

Berland explores how understandings of space and time, empire and margin, embodiment and technology, and nature and culture are shaped by broadly conceived communications technologies including pianos, radio, television, the Web, and satellite imaging. Along the way, she provides a useful overview of the assumptions driving communications research on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, and she highlights the distinctive contributions of the Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Berland argues that electronic mediation is central to the construction of social space and therefore to anti-imperialist critique. She illuminates crucial links between how space is traversed, how it is narrated, and how it is used. Making an important contribution to scholarship on globalization, Berland calls for more sophisticated accounts of media and cultural technologies and their complex “geographies of influence.”

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