Miljana “Manja” Podovac is an interdisciplinary researcher working across critical environmental humanities, corporeal/embodied studies, and media studies. Her work examines extractivist logics through decolonizing and ecocritical approaches to visual and sonic media formations. With a focus on ecomedia, her research engages counter-visual and sonic practices and the body as a site where ecological and power relations are inscribed and contested.

She is a PhD Research Associate at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) within the Structured Doctoral Programme “Performing Matters: Manifold Temporalities”. Previously, she pursued doctoral studies in Media Theory and Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her academic background encompasses an MSc in Social and Human Ecology (Vienna), an MA in Sports Management (Novi Sad), and a BA(Hons) in Sport Sciences and Physical Culture (Novi Sad).

podovac@mdw.ac.at
+43 1 71155 – 2046

Eco-Countervisuality: Subversive Bodies, Aesthetic Justice, and Decolonial Image-Making Practice

The dissertation project examines contemporary artistic media practices that use audiovisual forms as ecocritical and countervisual strategies against infrastructures of colonial extractive regimes. These practices are grounded in decolonial Indigenous grassroots media, feminist communal self-organization practices of rematriation, and digital media forms that expose the very bond between the materiality of the image/visual and racial environmental relations.

In opposition to the logic of the Anthropocene, which erases histories of racial colonial extractivism, by engaging the key terms of eco-countervisuality and aesthetic justice, the research sets up these theoretical frameworks as pivotal to examining how contemporary (inter)medial forms, particularly image and sound/sonic, function as decolonizing means of resistance that unsettle the dominant grammar of geovisual coloniality.

Bringing together media studies, social ecology, decolonial feminist philosophy, and corporeal/embodied studies, the project aims to develop a way of re-thinking media beyond its technological apparatuses. It proposes an alternative understanding of the relation between the medium of earth and media as cultural and artistic production, where human and inhuman collide against a backdrop of neo-colonial, anthropocenic, and racial extractive temporalities.