Congratulations to CPCF student Robert O’Neill who was recently announced as the winner of the Faculty of Social Sciences Academic Excellence Award for his essay “Who Gets to Destroy the Environment: Objective Violence and the Ideological Work of Contemporary Eco-Cinema”.

Professor Christie Milliken, who teaches Eco-Cinema (FILM 4P58), explains that the essay “interrogates some of the traditional ways in which violence is theorized to reconceive the problem of representation that accrues around environmental harms. Using the eco-thriller Michael Clayton (2007), and two eco-terrorist films, Night Moves (2013) and First Reformed (2017) as case studies, O’Neill deftly shows how these narratives conceal the reality of environmental harm by offering narrative trajectories built on character studies that might punish transgressors, or dramatize the psychological toll of fighting eco harms, but which ultimately fail to expose ongoing, intransigent structural harms that are part of the violence of the system itself.”