Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Film and Digital Media Department

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Film
Documentary Studies

Primary Office Location Kresge College Academic Building
1205

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 - 3:00 pm

Mail Stop Film and Digital Media

Biography, Education and Training

1995-1999: BA in Translation Studies, Bosphorus University (Turkey)

2000-2003: MA in Radio, Television and Film, Marmara University (Turkey)

2003-2011: PhD in Film and Media Studies, Wayne State University (USA)

2010: Certificate in "Digital Discourse: Theory, Art, Archive," School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University (USA)

Summary of Expertise

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.

Research Interests

• Contemporary documentary practices and theory;
• digital media and post-cinema;
• eco-cinema and eco-media studies;
• climate change and the Anthropocene;
• sound studies;
• the acoustic ecologies of documentary (especially those that give resonance to the experiences of marginalized communities that are at the center of world crises such as geo-political conflicts, clandestine migrations, and climate change).
• migration studies;
• Turkish national and transnational cinemas;
• film philosophy;
• media art activism

Teaching Interests

• documentary studies;
• eco-cinema and eco-media;
• critical perspectives in animation;
• international cinema;
• post-cinema and digital aesthetics;
• media in the Anthropocene

Selected Presentations

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.

Selected Publications

Book Chapters:

2025   “Documentary Realism in the Anthropocene,” in The Handbook of Documentary. Ed. Kate Nash and Deane Williams.

2022    “Ethological Realism in Honeyland,” in Honeyland: A Docalogue. Ed. Jaimie Baron and Kristen Fuhs. New York: Taylor and Francis. 

2022    “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    “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    “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    [Co-authored with 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    “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. 

Articles: 

2020    [Co-authored with 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   “The Anthropocene Project and the Archiviolithic Imaginary,” Screen, 61.2 (Summer): 315–321.

2015   “Rebels Without Regret: Documentary Artivism in the Digital Age,” Studies in Documentary Film, 9.1 (February): 42-54.

2015   [Co-authored with Camilla Møhring Reestorff] “Introduction: Unruly Documentary Artivism,” co-authored with Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Studies in Documentary Film, 9.1 (February): 1-9.

2014    “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    "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.