Product details
- ISBN 9780253075505
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 02 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Indiana University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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As record-breaking wildfires moved across eastern Canada and record rainfalls flooded Dubai; as billionaires offshored immense profits while so-called essential workers risked their lives during a pandemic; resources, knowledge, and even life itself are increasingly privatized – and disruptions have become the status quo to ensure as much.
Documentary Habitats argues that overlapping crises demand strategies for the long term rather than short-term technocratic pivots. They require local and Indigenous knowledge, derived from extended living with a place, rather than faith in techno-solutions designed to generate profit elsewhere. By redefining humans as one species of many in shared habitats rather than as an exceptional species with unchecked domain over the planet, authors Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann offer a powerful counterpart to understandings of documentary conceived almost exclusively as centered not only on humans, but on humans who exploit modern systems. Across eight categories of relationships – entanglements, polyphonies, contaminations, iterations, navigations, extractions, adaptations, and infections – Documentary Habitats follows documentary practices that are community oriented, dialogue-driven, place-based, and research-led, using augmented reality, interactive and mobile technologies, film and photography, and video installation.
Featuring works by artists and filmmakers from over 25 countries and drawing on two decades of curatorial collaborations, Documentary Habitats is a rallying cry to documentary studies to focus attention on environmental and social issues that may seem new and urgent to some people but are all too familiar to others.
Dale Hudson is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi, a digital curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), and coordinator of the Films from the Gulf at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Film Festival.
Patricia R. Zimmermann was the Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College, director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), co-curator (with Louis Massiah) of We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, and editor-at-large of The Edge.
