Environment + Genre with Shannon Davies Mancus

Shannon Davies Mancus’s (she/her) undergraduate and first degree was in musical theatre, and she has maintained a performance praxis through her second career as an academic. She is currently an Associate Teaching Professor and coordinator of the Nature and Human Values program at the Colorado School of Mines. Her work can be found in publications such as Performing Ethos, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-first Century Feminist Theory. Her work focuses on the political performativity of environmentalist media in visual and popular culture. She loves traveling, community, and sharing exciting ideas.

Her obsession with pop culture runs deep, but mostly focuses influences the narratives that tell us there’s only one “right” way to be an environmentalist, and how we can move beyond that script to reach new and better stories. Not just so we can “appear” a new way, but so that we might actually relate to one other more and begin to truly shift our environmental future. 

That’s part of what she and Brandi talk about on this official first interview episode of the show, on the intersections of Environment + Genre, plus:

• What scripts and genres have to do with the media we consume and how we behave in the world.
• The power of stories and something called “the information deficit model,” an idea from science communication.
• Shanon’s story of living through 9/11 and the film that helped her see movies as a form of artwork that can create a public sphere for difficult dialogue.
• Why she loves studying popular imagination around witches and how they connect to our sense of environmental doom.
• How she’s weaved together all of the seemingly disparate things in her career into where she is now, but how that only became clear in hindsight.
• And, why she loves teaching unexpected things to math and engineering students.
  
  

Listeners can find Shannon Davies Mancus on Twitter @shannonmancus and on Instagram @shannonmancus.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital