“Perspectives from within Earthly Interiorities”: Reflecting on Janet Walker’s Career

Sage Gerson

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The quote in the first half of my rather toothy title is borrowed from Janet Walker’s 2021 afterword to Saturation: An Elemental Politics, edited by Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz. In my search for a language that could simultaneously honor the energy and verve of Walker’s approach to mentorship and do justice to her intellectual body of work, I did what I have done countless times before when I struggled to put language to what I feel and intuit: I returned to Walker’s own writing in search of words worthy of the task.

In her afterword, titled “Climate Change as Matter out of Phase,” Walker writes that Saturation offers “perspectives from within earthly interiorities,” that the collection acts as “an invaluable field guide to living, loving, laboring, investigating, consuming, making art, and everything else ‘from within climate change.’”[1] It may seem nonintuitive to launch a reflection on Walker’s productive career—which includes co-launching the journal Media+Environment through the UC Press, as well as six single- and co-authored books focused on feminist film analysis, documentary film studies, and trauma and memory studies, among other topics—through this brief afterword. However, this afterword, in which Walker offers the compelling definition of climate change “as matter out of phase” (building on Mary Douglas’s foundational theorization of dirt as “matter out of place”[2]), so much of what makes Walker a brilliant and generous scholar is on full display, including her commitments to feminist research methods of place-based, situated knowledges and her generous collegial and collaborative spirit. Walker’s afterword produces knowledge about climate change through her own experience of living through the 2017 Montecito debris flow and preceding Thomas Fire (briefly the largest fire in California history). Theorizing from her own positionality within a changing climate—of living through the consequences of “matter out of phase”—many of Walker’s major scholarly contributions commingle: spatialization and the spatial turn,[3] “situated testimony” (in this case, her own),[4] and the importance and process of “bearing witness.”[5]

I may also be repeatedly drawn to this afterword because it sits smack dab in the middle of the years in which I have known Walker and exemplifies the methods and topics I understand to be her scholarly priorities during this time. I came to know Walker later in her career—through her last decade of teaching and research in media and environment, climate and environmental justice, and critical infrastructure studies. Walker’s contributions to the study of media and environment bring her readers to some of the most important and influential sites in the global struggle for environmental and social justice, including New Orleans post-hurricanes Katrina and Rita;[6] the #NODAPL Water Protectors’ encampment on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation;[7] occupied Palestine;[8] the post-BP blowout Gulf;[9] and recently, the ongoing struggle over water in the Owen’s valley.[10]

I met Walker at the very beginning of my own scholarly career, meaning my intellectual trajectory as a scholar was foundationally shaped by her influence. I am going to take you back to two of my formative interactions with her. Let me set the scene: It is spring 2017, and I am a first-year graduate student in Walker’s "Media & Environment: Climate Justice" course. It is the first day of classes and Walker is profusely apologizing for assigning Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment, the collection that she co-authored with Nicole Starosielski. She insists that she is not assigning it because of ego or book royalties, but instead because Starosielski and the other contributors to the volume are so brilliant. At this point, I am a little surprised and confused because I had previously been assigned professors’ own work in other classes and none of them had ever commented on it. In other words, it seemed a fairly common practice. I concluded, accurately, that Walker is humble and did not think much about it again until the day we were scheduled to discuss selected essays from the collection. Walker began class by passing each student an unmarked envelope. Puzzled, I remember looking inside and realizing she had given each of us a cash reimbursement for her portion of the royalties from the book. I had never and would never encounter this from another professor again.

Not only does this story shed light on Walker’s integrity as a mentor and teacher (caring, generous, and aware of the deeply inequitable financial reality of being a graduate student) but it is also an important memory to me because it is my introduction to Sustainable Media, a text that continues to be useful to me as both a teacher and scholar of the environmental humanities. I return to the works inside the collection again and again in my own classes, such as Energy Pasts/Presents/Futures and Theories of NatureCulture, during discussions about sustainability. In their introduction, Walker and Starosielski critically and carefully unpack the concept of sustainability, prompting their readers (my students) to ask: is sustainability inherently a form of greenwashing because it works to extend the messed-up structures of the present and their resultant violences as far into the future as possible? Or, is it a more radical concept that makes evident Earth’s very real material limits? As Walker and Starosielski trace, an analysis of the scholarship on sustainability has shown that the term is used in at least 300 different ways.[11] Walker and Starosielski’s introduction helps me teach my students a valuable lesson about the slipperiness of putting language to ideas—to ecological, economic, and developmental power relations.

As a scholar, my initial introduction to Sustainable Media is important to me because it is in this text that Walker and Starosielski build a theoretical bridge I will go on to cross, over and over, during the next five years of graduate school and into the present. It is my first time turning to Walker’s written work to help me put language to my inchoate internal world of ideas. When I talk about putting language to my interior world, I am drawing on and thinking alongside Linda Hogan, the Chickasaw Nation’s writer in residence. In her essay, “A Different Yield,” included in her collection Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living Earth, Hogan writes about language in three distinct ways. Firstly, she describes language as a system of signs and symbols. Secondly, language enables individuals to share their interior worlds: it spans people’s inner selves and the exterior world, building a bridge of shared understanding and thus fostering connection. And thirdly, Hogan posits, humans are searching for the language to reconnect and renew human relationships with the environment.

It might be a good idea to briefly pause here and say that I am a bit of an interloper in film and media studies, Walker’s home discipline. I am a literature scholar. Yet, I have never felt that Walker’s focus on documentary and mine on literature has ever created incommensuralities. Walker has written that documentary films “not only . . . sense and . . . represent but actually [have the capacity] to remap and remake the natural environment.”[12] I would describe my own insistence on literature, poetics, and narrative in parallel terms—as containing the possibility to remake the world.

However, up until graduate school, I was taught textual analysis solely in a very traditional and limited Western way: there is the world of the text—the literary content—and it exists separately from the material world I inhabit as a reader. Despite this, I remained committed to storytelling as a form of cultural intervention and cultural continuance—narrative as fuel for imagining, enacting, and building the world. So, across disciplinary boundaries, I feel it in my gut, heart, and brain, when I read how Walker and Starosielski put language to their project in Sustainable Media. They write:

We do not frame our work as moving from representational to infrastructural analysis (with the concomitant text-infrastructure binary). [Instead, we are] engaged in reconnecting theoretically informed representational analysis . . . to matters of science and technology, labor and power, and contaminated environments . . . texts are not readable a priori, independent of the environments they mediate, but rather come into being through relational, ecological processes.[13]

Walker and Starioselski’s approach refuses to dichotomize the representational and the material. Instead, they lay the path for a third approach, a way forward out of the binary, through the relational and the ecological. This refusal to dichotomize shapes Walker’s spatialized and situated documentary film scholarship, which fosters relationality with the land and imagined geographies of the films she analyzes, as well as with the people who dwell in these landscapes. In “The Environment is Not B-Roll: Critical Ecomedia Justice for Makers, a Story Back Initiative,” co-authored with Mia Lopez (Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation), Walker explains, “I now find it impossible to study and teach documentaries shot in a particular place without recognizing the original custodians and the relationality of lands and waters.”[14] Walker’s statement begins to gesture to her current methodology, one that conceives of documentary film as mediating relationships to place (both “real” and “imagined”) and the people who live and pass through there.[15]

The second early interaction I had with Walker as a first-year graduate student was in office hours. I was rambling about a seminar paper for her class that would go on to become the first chapter of my dissertation and then a published article, but at the time was a barely legible constellation of observations about electricity infrastructure and the racialized power dynamics of US grid life. I pause my monologue, and Walker, who was listening with her usual enthusiasm, responds by saying that she tries to avoid using the word “seminal” in her work.

I freeze and frantically retrace what I have just said in my mind, trying to place this tidbit of seemingly non sequitur feedback. Sensing my unsureness, Walker explains that seminal, in that it comes from semen, traces a very masculinist genealogy of thought (and life force).[16] In a slight panic with the concern that Walker might think I am somehow less of a feminist because of my masculinist vocabulary, I try to remain calm and ask her what word she uses instead.

She responds with aplomb that the word “germinal” does the trick without relying on a gendered understanding of life’s origins. “Germinal” relates to spring and takes its meaning from the sprouting of seeds. Again, Walker returns us to the ecological, to the cyclical rebirth of spring and the growth of seeds. Like with sustainability, Walker’s attention to how one makes and communicates meaning taught me something about the important process of putting language to my observations and ideas—to the bridge of shared understanding I build between my inner life and the exterior world.

In Living a Feminist Life Sarah Ahmed describes the process and politics of citation as potentially powerful building blocks—in her words, the “bricks”—for establishing feminist genealogies, acknowledging feminist memory, and producing more just forms of knowledge and intellectual practice. Ahmed writes, “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.”[17] And so, Walker, I write this as part of the intellectual debt I owe you, someone who has helped me find my way, who has enabled me to put language to my interior, intellectual world, who has provided “bricks” to several generations of environmental, feminist, documentary, and trauma studies scholars. You make our work possible.

Coming full circle, back to my toothy title, I ultimately frame this essay with a quote from Saturation’s afterword because Walker’s writing about the collection also gives language to how I would describe the experience of being in an intellectual community with her: I have learned from Walker how to foster critical “perspectives from within earthly interiorities” committed to relationality and environmental justice. She has mentored me through the experience of coming into my intellectual self in the aftermath of many world endings and from within a present in which the powers that be remain committed to the single destructive narrative of extinction, which she has aptly described as “the extractiveecologics of our time.”[18] Her writing, teaching, collaboration, and mentorship provide a “field guide to living, loving, laboring, investigating, consuming, making art, and everything else ‘from within climate change.’” If this is not a “brick,” if this is not a praxis of feminist ecological futurity, I do not know what is.

Notes

[1]Janet Walker. “Afterword: Climate Change as Matter out of Phase.” Saturation: An Elemental Politics. ed. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 310, 309.

[2]Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 36.

[3]In “Media mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story,” Walker identifies films as having “kinship with other geolocational media” and “demonstrates how these media together co-constitute the environments they may only seem to sense, scan, photograph, map, mark, snake through, or hover over.” See Janet Walker, “Media Mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story,” NESCUS. European Journal of Media Studies (2018, 7 no. 2), 229.

[4]Walker theorizes about situated testimony in her article “Rights and Return: Perils and Fantasies of Situated Testimony after Katrina” in Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (New York: Routledge, 2010).

[5]Drawing on trauma studies scholar Cathy Caruth and theorist of Holocaust trauma Dori Laub, Walker theorizes the import of “bearing witness” in her article “Eavesdropping in The Cove: Interspecies ethics, public and private space, and trauma under water.” Studies in Documentary Film (2013, 7 no. 3.), pp. 209-232.

[6]Walker, “Rights and Return.”

[7]Janet Walker, “Standing with Standing Rock: Media, Mapping, and Survivance,” Media Fields Journal: Critical Explorations in Media and Space (2018 no. 13).

[8]Janet Walker, “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory,” Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema, ed. By Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. pp. 329-356.

[9]Walker, “Media Mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story.”

[10]Janet Walker, “Remembering and Re-Imagining Payahuunadü (Land of the Flowing Water): A Design for Spatial Documentary Studies,” presentation at the Media Inside Out conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, April 25, 2024.

[11]Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski, Sustainable Media (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6.

[12]Walker, “Eavesdropping in The Cove,” 211.

[13]Walker and Starosielski, Sustainable Media, 4.

[14]Mia Lopez and Janet Walker, “The Environment is Not B-Roll: Critical Ecomedia Justice for Makers, a Story Back Initiative,” Journal for Cinema and Media Studies vol. 63 no. 7(2024). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms/18261332.0063.705/--environment-is-not-b-roll-critical-ecomedia-justice-for?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

[15]I understand Walker’s method to be one that attempts to foreground relationality as a mode of engagement with documentary film. For those interested in learning more about relationality, I recommend Joseph M. Pierce’s (Cherokee) “A Manifesto for Speculative Relations,” and Kim Tallbear’s article “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Pierce writes that “Relations are not a metaphor, but the enactment of reciprocity in our everyday occupations, spiritual engagements, and conceptual projections.” Tallbear offers the concept of “caretaking relations” as one, particularly Dakota though translatable across other Native traditions, way of being that undercuts the settler state’s property relations rooted in dispossession, extraction, and ownership. The act of “caretaking relations” provides a spatialized/place-based alternative model of kin-making to the colonial “American Dream,” which Tallbear demonstrates requires land theft and the elimination of Native people. See Joseph M. Pierce, “A Manifesto for Speculative Relations” in Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024, 19. See Kim Tallbear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, 2019, 6 no. 1.

[16]Seminal enters late Middle English from Old French seminal and Latin seminalis, both from semen.

[17]Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.

[18]Walker, “Afterword,” 310.

Sage Gerson is an assistant professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she also coordinates and teaches for the Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies undergraduate and graduate programs. Her research appears in the journals Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Social Text, Media+Environment, and the Cultural Studies Association’s Lateral, among other places