River Delta Futures

A transdisciplinary collection of essays, this book examines a range of audiovisual culture strategies and practices employed by vulnerable communities, local artists, and international scholars in response to delta change and climate breakdown around the world, ranging across cinema, music videos, comics and more.

How are climate change, weather-related disasters, food and water insecurity, and energetic and infrastructural collapse narrated audiovisually in the most environmentally vulnerable areas of the Planet? This book addresses this and related questions by adopting a local and transdisciplinary perspective on river deltas from different areas of the world.

River deltas have historically been hotspots for human civilizations, as populations settled in their fertile grounds seeking resources and opportunities for prosperity. Despite this, the terrains and livelihoods of those who rely on them are under threat from human exploitation, environmental degradation, and rapidly accelerating climate change. Inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this book provides a range of focused audiovisual analyses of deltaic spaces. Ranging across a variety of media, including documentary filmmaking, animation, photography, collaborative comic making, participatory visual art practices, soundwalking, and film analysis, it examines the role that contemporary audiovisual media play in forging global environmental imaginaries. In doing so, it adopts a transdisciplinary approach to the Blue Humanities from countries across the world, including Canada, Bolivia, Brazil, Greece, Nigeria, Senegal, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.