Overview

How does culture influence human relationships with the environment? In Monstrous Nature and Representations of Environmental Harms, green cultural criminologists Avi Brisman and Nigel South examine stories of monsters and disasters to address how the ways we depict and think about harms to the environment dissuade us from taking care of our planet and each other. The authors use examples from popular culture, including Disney and Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to consider ideas about how the environment responds to people who cause it harm. Brisman and South identify and discuss three dominant and interrelated depictions of the relationship between humans and the environment: first, nature as monstrous or fear inducing; second, nature and the Earth (or parts of it) as abject; and third, the entanglement of nature and the apocalypse, wherein nature is contributing to the end of the world, with an end point sometimes conceptualized as one without humans.​ Monstrous Nature and Representations of Environmental Harms argues that such representations have material consequences. The authors make the case for challenging them so that we neither perpetuate them nor retreat into cynicism and defeatism about the future of our planet.

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9781439923016

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Avi Brisman is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology, an Honorary Professor at the Newcastle School of Law and Justice at the University of Newcastle, and a University Fellow at the Centre of Law and Social Justice at the University of Newcastle. His most recent monograph is Fieldnotes on a Study of Young People's Perceptions of Crime and Justice: Scaffolding as Structure. Nigel South is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex; Honorary Visiting Professor, Institute for Social Justice and Crime, University of Suffolk; and Adjunct Professor, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology. In 2022 he received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Society of Criminology and in 2013 a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. His work is the focus of the book Criminological Connections, Directions, Horizons: Essays in Honour of Nigel South.

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