Saturation: An Elemental Politics

Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other.

Contributors. Marija Cetinic, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska

Author: Melody Jue
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 11/05/2021
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.72d
ISBN13: 9781478011460
ISBN10: 1478011467
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Media Studies
- Science | Environmental Science (see also Chemistry | Environmental)
- Social Science | Human Geography

About the Author
Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, also published by Duke University Press.

Rafico Ruiz is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, also published by Duke University Press.