Janet Walker (PhD, UCLA) is Professor Emerita of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a former two-term department chair and former chair of the Committee on Academic Personnel. She is a recipient UCSB’s Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award (2001) and co-Founding Editor-in-Chief of the UC Press open access journal Media+Environment. Her partners in these endeavors have included faculty, students, and staff namely though not limited to Kathy Carnahan, Kathy Murray, Joe Palladino, Liba Hladik, Jackie Grossberg, Stephen Borunda, Tinghao Zhou, and Nadia Ahmed. With research specializations including documentary film and media, trauma and memory studies, and environmental media, Walker is author, editor, or co-editor of six books and numerous published essays. Written from a feminist perspective, Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (Minnesota University Press, 1993) analyzes psychoanalytic journal literature, marriage manuals, pharmaceutical ads, and of course movies in order to contribute to our sense of the historical formation of varieties of psychological thought and of the ideological struggles that sculpted their diffusion into popular culture. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2005) theorizes a modality of filmic representation by drawing, once again, from a scholarly framework and cultural purview: in this case, the arena of interdisciplinary trauma studies and the heated debates or “memory wars” of the 1990s about the nature of evidence and the vicissitudes of memory. Walker’s volumes are Feminism and Documentary (co-edited with Diane Waldman, Minnesota University Press/Visible Evidence Series, 1999), Westerns: Films though History (Routledge in the AFI Film Readers series edited by Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe, 2001), Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (co-edited with Bhaskar Sarkar, Routledge/AFI Film Readers, 2010), and Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (co-edited with Nicole Starosielski, Routledge, 2016). Walker has spoken at conferences and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad in cities including Perth, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Belfast, London, Berlin, Oslo, and Montreal. She is the recipient of grants from the ACLS, the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the California Story Fund for the project Video Portraits of Survival with Kwame Braun and Elizabeth Wolfson, and from the Rachel Carson Center in Munich for the residency that enabled the start of Media+Environment. She served for multiple years as a juror for the Fund for Santa Barbara’s and Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Social Justice Documentary Award competitions and has been a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for four decades, for which organization she served as an Executive Council Member (1997-2000) and Editorial Board Member of Cinema Journal (2008-2013), and co-founded SCMS’s Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group. She has been enormously inspired as a participant in the Visible Evidence Community since the beginning.

My academic training took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, shaped by politically important developments and debates in psychoanalytically-informed feminist film theory. At UCLA, I studied with faculty including my dissertation advisor Janet Bergstrom, departmental committee members Stephen Mamber and Nick Browne, and visiting faculty Christine Gledhill and Thomas Elsaesser. I also had the good fortune of participating in the Paris Film Program with faculty including Raymond Bellour, Jacqueline Rose, Daniel Dayan, and two analysands of Lacan (who told marvelous stories of their individual analytic sessions), during which time I heard Foucault and Bourdieu speak at the Collège de France. I want to add here that my earlier teachers Janey Place and Robin Wood, the latter while I was on the Education Abroad Program at the University of Warwick, were crucial influences along the way. Later, in 1993, thanks to Janet Bergstrom, I enjoyed the honor of speaking at an international conference held at UCLA that brought together prominent cinema scholars and practicing psychoanalysts whose chapters appeared in Endless Night:  Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (1999), and mine as well.

My life changed and the psychoanalytic conversation continued when I was hired as a lecturer at Denver University in the mid-1980s thanks to Diane Waldman, and nearly ten years later as assistant professor in the Communication Department at Wayne State University, supported by the late Jackie Byars, whose loss I feel keenly. Thank you to colleagues who appointed me to  courses at Cal State LA, Cal State Fullerton, UCLA, UCI, and USC for the valuable experience of teaching in your midst.

Charles Wolfe, Constance Penley, our department’s co-founder the late Edward Branigan, and committee hired me back to UCSB as assistant professor in 1996 (having served as visiting assistant professor for two years in the late 1980s) and I am forever grateful. Constance insisted on and advised the beginnings of Trauma Cinema. Conceptualizing “trauma cinema” and the “traumatic paradox,” the book is concerned to delineate as matters of sociocultural history how certain retrospective strategies (reenactment, enactment, flashbacks, and the like) expose and express “without seeking to rationalize” the havoc trauma wreaks on self, society, history, and memory. A few years later, working with Bhaskar Sarkar as part of our “trauma unit” (research focus group) and on the volume elasticized my approach. Looking back from the perspective of today, I am all the more certain about the uncertainties of trauma and memory and all the more grateful for the many additional interlocutors who enlightened this work: namely, but not limited to Maureen Turim, Diane Waldman, Noah Shenker, Susannah Radstone, Mick Broderick, Maurice Stevens, Jakob Lothe, Ohad Landesman, and Raya Morag.

Constance Penley also encouraged my homecoming to environmental matters (I was an environmental activist as a girl in the late 1960s and early ‘70s) by inviting my participation, along with that of Nicole Starosielski, in the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Environmental Media Initiative to explore “all the ways that media and environment influence, shape, and inhabit one another.” Meanwhile, Lisa Parks’ leadership of media studies’ spatial turn and, with Nicole, of critical infrastructure, studies also ushered me along the path where I am found. Lisa advised me to visit New Orleans, which I did with the guidance of former student Dave Cash. She also advised me to participate in the Standing Rock resistance, which I did thanks to independent mediamaker Todd Darling and where I ran into our former student Renée Bergan who was working on the Oceti Sakowin camp media team.

One of the most remarkable aspects of serving on the faculty of UCSB has been the opportunity to bring this institution’s major resources to pressing causes. Programs I have been thrilled to co-organize include the 2012-13 “Figuring Sea Level Rise” theme of UCSB’s Critical Issues in America initiative (videos available online through UCTV), the “Climate Justice Futures: Movements, Gender, Media” initiative of UCSB’s Crossroads series, and the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Energy Justice in Global Perspective” (2017-2019), with Javiera Barandiarán, Mona Damluji, Stephan Miescher, and David Pellow.

In May of 2017, a small group of us including Claudio Fogu, Todd Darling, doctoral student Margaret McMurtrey (citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a Cherokee, Creek, and Kaskaski Illini descendent), with Mia Lopez (Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation) sought campus resources to bring Water Protectors from the Standing Rock resistance to the UCSB campus—along with the Red Lightning Dome where meetings had taken place once winter set in. Under the auspices of the Carsey-Wolf Center, with thanks to Patrice Petro, Emily Zinn, and Paula Firth, we put out a call for support. There came by return email dozens of pledges, many fervently expressed, from academic departments, units, and offices; the whole range of upper administrators; and even individual sponsors. The dome arrived with the dust of Oceti Sakowin still on it, and members of the American Indian & Indigenous Student Association gathered with faculty and staff under the supervision of the Red Lightning community to install it on the lawn behind the Visitors Center. The groundskeepers turned off the sprinklers while facilities bored a hole through a building door so that electricity and ethernet could flow to the dome. The Water Protectors who joined us are: Paula Antoine (Sicangu Lakota), John Bigelow (Hunkpapa Lakota/Standing Rock Sioux Tribe), Jasilyn Charger (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe), Terrell Iron Shell (Eastern Band of Cherokee/Oglala Lakota), Mark Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), Johnnie Aseron (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe), and the late and deeply missed Joye Braun (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe) and Myron Dewey (Walker River Paiute). Michael Cordero (Chumash Coastal Band) also spoke as a panelist. Meetings, classes, a film screening, and a drum circle were held in this pop-up venue, attended by hundreds of students, staff, and faculty. The Water Protectors livestreamed events to tens of thousands of people, calling out “mne wiconi,” “Water is Life, we will do this again.” The videotaped panel discussions as UCTV programs have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Since the depredations of European invasion continue their disproportionate effect on already disadvantaged populations—as expressed through documentary, trauma, and testimony—I feel as though my background and experience are relevant to the charge of Standing with Standing Rock: to follow Indigenous leadership for decolonization, indigenization, stewardship, and the land- and water-back movements. My essays in this area appear in: Media Fields (issues 3, 13, and the special conference issue thanks to Ryan Bowles, Rahul Mukherkjee, David Gray, Jade Petermon, Rachel Fabian, Hannah Goodwin, Sarah Lerner, and Bhargavi Narayanan), NECSUS (2018), A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (2020), co-authored with Ariel Nelson in The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar (2020), with thanks to J.P. Sniadecki in The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies edited by Antonio López, Adrian Ivakhiv, Stephen Rust, Miriam Tola, Alenda Y. Chang, and Kiu-wai Chu (2023); and, naturally, Media+Environment (various pieces co-authored with co-Chief Editors Alenda Chang and Adrian Ivakhiv [2019], M+E Advisory Board Member Lisa Parks [2020], and the stream “Energy Justice in Global Perspective” co-edited and introduced with the Mellon Sawyer team (2022). Mia Lopez and I have just published “The Environment Is Not B-Roll: Critical Ecomedia Justice for Makers, a Story Back Initiative” in a dossier edited by Ben Mendelsohn for the JCMS Teaching Media initiative of which Alenda Chang is Special Features Editor.

Teaching and mentoring have been a sustaining joy. I have taught many hundreds of undergraduate students, quite a few of whom I am happy still to know or to admire from afar. Courses included Films of the Natural and Human Environment, Contemporary Documentary Studies, and (Auto)biographical Documentary, as well as multiple iterations of International Film History (101ABC), Documentary Film from World War II to the Present (125B), and seminar in Film Historiography, among other offerings.

Then, in the aughts, a great privilege was co-creating our graduate program, and shepherding it through campus and system-wide committees while serving as department chair. Teaching the graduate seminars Media and Geography, Media and Environment: Climate Justice, and not to neglect Dissertation Prospectus Preparation, has been completely absorbing and inspiring. I am deeply grateful to the PhDs who joined us and then went on to transform scholarly areas and varieties of intellectual and media communities; I have relished our connections.

Serving at UCSB has been amazing in and of itself and as a springboard to broader participation in humanities-based film and media studies. I appreciate that along with research and teaching excellence this public university stands for anti-racism, divestment and decarbonization, and myriad forms of social and environmental justice. Thank you for this conference. It means the world to me.

Janet Walker’s current book-in-progress concerns media, mapping, and environmental justice.