IHC Pre-Doctoral Fellow: Zachary Horton

IHC Pre-Doctoral Fellow: Zachary Horton

Zachary Horton is a Doctoral Candidate in English. His dissertation is titled Scale and Alterity: Ecology, Media, and Technics After the Human.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary effort to analyze current techno-scientific discourses for underlying scalar frameworks that constrain personal, local, and transnational efforts to think other scales. It will examine the recent trend in popular cinema of the “vulnerable earth narrative,” the interweaving of natural and media ecologies in the early 1970s inaugurated by the circulation of “whole earth” satellite imagery, the utopian (and neo-colonial) threads of the nanotech imaginary, the relationship between Silicon Valley entrepreneurial endeavors and indigenous environmental justice struggles and the potential of experimental art and literature to rehearse more generative transcalar encounters.