she/her
Arts Division
Acting Associate Professor
Faculty
Film and Digital Media
Selmin Kara is an Acting Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media Studies at UCSC. Her primary research interests are digital aesthetics and ecological sensibilities in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. She is the co-editor of Contemporary Documentary (2015) and Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (2021). Her work has also appeared in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Sequence, Music and Sound in Nonfiction Film, The Philosophy of Documentary, and Studies in Documentary Film.
Selmin Kara's scholarship, teaching, and collaborative research activities examine the entanglements between post-cinematic/digital media and the climate crisis, as these increasingly shape (premediate, activate, and foreclose) our global visions for the future in the twenty-first century. More specifically, she focuses on the ways climate change concerns get mediated through a wide range of digital technologies (such as film, networked media, animation, VR, and AR), giving rise to new epistemological, aesthetic, and social justice frameworks.
2024 “The Roots of Contingency: Documenting the Arbo-Real,” Visible Evidence XXX, Melbourne, Australia
2023 “Documentary’s Nocturnal Ecologies,” Visible Evidence XXIX, Udine, Italy
2022 “Sounding Migration and Embodied Risk in El mar la mar,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Conference
2019 "Cine-forming Life," Biannual conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), California, Davis.
2019 "The Anthropocene Project and the Archiviolithic Imaginary," 3rd Interdisciplinary Ecological-Ethical Encounters, Istanbul, Turkey.
2018 “Weird Life and the Cinematic Anthropocene,” 32nd Annual Conference of Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), Toronto.
2018 “Post-cinema, Future Cities, and Ecological Design,” Ontario Climate Consortium, Toronto.
2018 “World Upside Down: Transmediating the Anthropocene,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Conference, Toronto.
2017 “Ditch Plains and the Post-Cinematic Documentary,” Visible Evidence XXIV, Buenos Aires.
2016 “The Anthropocene Breach,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Conference, Atlanta, USA.
Articles:
2020 Kara, Selmin, and Cydney Langill. “Weirding Climate Realism in Sunshine and Ex-Machina,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 7.2-3 (Spring-Fall): 60-81.
2020 Kara, Selmin. “The Anthropocene Project and the Archiviolithic Imaginary,” Screen, 61.2 (Summer): 315–321.
2015 Kara, Selmin. “Rebels Without Regret: Documentary Artivism in the Digital Age,” Studies in Documentary Film, 9.1 (February): 42-54.
2015 Møhring Reestorff, Camilla, and Selmin Kara. “Introduction: Unruly Documentary Artivism,” co-authored with Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Studies in Documentary Film, 9.1 (February): 1-9.
2014 Kara, Selmin. “Beasts of the Digital Wild: Primordigital Cinema and the Question of Origins,” Sequence: Serial Studies of Media, Film and Music 1. 4 (Online, Summer).
2009 Kara, Selmin. "Reassembling the Nation: Iraq in Fragments and the Acoustics of Occupation," Studies in Documentary Film (Issue on Documentary Films after 9/11), 3. 3 (September): 259-274.
Book Chapters:
[Forthcoming] Kara, Selmin. “Documentary Realism in the Anthropocene,” in The Handbook of Documentary. Ed. Kate Nash and Deane Williams.
2022 Kara, Selmin. “Ethological Realism in Honeyland,” in Honeyland: A Docalogue. Ed. Jaimie Baron and Kristen Fuhs. New York: Taylor and Francis.
2022 Kara, Selmin. “Across the Sonorous Desert: The Audiovisual Ecology of Migration in El Mar La Mar,” in Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Ed. Robert Burgoyne and Deniz Bayrakdar. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
2016 Kara, Selmin. “Redefining Documentary Materialism: from Actuality to Virtuality in Victor Erice’s Dream of Light,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film. Ed. David LaRocca. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books: 343-361.
2016 Kara, Selmin. “Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Ed. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda. REFRAME: Open-Access and Multimedia Publishing in Media, Film and Music Studies: 750-785. (also online, April 2016).
2014 Kara, Selmin, and Alanna Thain. “Sonic Ethnographies: Leviathan and New Materialisms in Documentary,” in Music and Sound in Documentary Film. Ed. Holly Rogers. New York: Taylor and Francis/Routledge: 180-192.
2013 Kara, Selmin. “The Sonic Summons: Meditations on Nature and Anempathetic Sound in Digital Documentaries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media. Ed. John Richardson, Amy Herzog, and
Carol Vernallis. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 582-598.
