Landscapes in the Frame: Anthropocene screens

The world is ending; yet, at the same time, we keep making new worlds. In his discussion of the ‘Third Nature,’ the Marxist geographer Neil Smith (2008) presaged such a paradox wherein human-fabricated simulacra of the (un)natural world around us via technological means (analogue, digital, cinematic, televisual, AI-generated) would function as part of a continuance of capitalist-neoliberal exploitation of all resources, whether human, fauna, flora or elemental. This special issue of Critical Studies in Television (CST) focuses on the ways in which the New Human Epoch features on our small screens. Our contributors, who represent a diverse cross-section of academic disciplines, from aesthetics to media studies, from cultural studies to cultural geography, offer the readers of CST a series of treatises that employ the screened landscape as a meditation on humanity’s geographical, geopolitical, and geological agency. Unsurprisingly, we do not present a pretty picture (even when what we analyse might enter into the realm of the sublime).