Contemporary Screen Ethics: Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew

Contemporary Screen Ethics focuses on the intertwining of the ethical with the socio-political, considering such topics as: care, decolonial feminism, ecology, histories of political violence, intersectionality, neoliberalism, race, and sexual and gendered violence. The collection advocates looking anew at the global complexity and diversity of such ethical issues across various screen media: from Netflix movies to VR, from Chinese romcoms to Brazilian pornochanchadas, from documentaries to drone warfare, from Jordan Peele movies to Google Earth. The analysis exposes the ethical tension between the inclusions and exclusions of global structural inequality (the identities of the haves, the absences of the have nots), alongside the need to understand our collective belonging to the planet demanded by the climate crisis. Informing the analysis, established thinkers like Deleuze, Irigaray, Jameson and Rancière are joined by an array of different voices – Ferreira da Silva, Gill, Lugones, Milroy, Muñoz, Sheshadri-Crooks, Vergès – to unlock contemporary screen ethics.

Lucy Bolton is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (2011) and Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (2019, EUP) as well as the co-editor of' Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (2016) and Contemporary Screen Ethics (2023, EUP). She is co-series editor of EUP’s Visionaries series.

David Martin-Jones is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Glasgow

Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney