“If You Don’t Nurture the Nature inside of You, You Will Eventually Die”: A Discourse-Theoretical Analysis of the Discursive Assemblage of Ecocentrism and Its Ethics in the Swedish Television Series Jordskott
1/2024
Authors: Nico Carpentier & Vaia Doudaki
Citation: Carpentier, N., & Doudaki, V. (2024). “If You Don’t Nurture the Nature inside of You, You Will Eventually Die”: A Discourse-Theoretical Analysis of the Discursive Assemblage of Ecocentrism and Its Ethics in the Swedish Television Series Jordskott. Mediální studia 18(1), 6–26.
Abstract: The article analyses the discursive construction of human-nature relationships in the first series of the Swedish television fiction series Jordskott, with its narrative about the supernatural. Driven by Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, the article investigates how the series intervenes in environmental debates through an active defence of the discursive assemblage of ecocentrism, using the discursive strategy of ethicisation to strengthen the claims for this assemblage and its constitutive discourses. By using the method of discourse-theoretical analysis, the article’s analysis scrutinizes Jordskott’s three main actor groups—nature, humans and humanoids—to show the articulation of ecocentrism, entanglementism, posthumanism, indigenism and (anti-)romanticism, and how an ethical repertoire is used to strengthen the position of this ecocentric discursive assemblage, in its struggle with anthropocentrism.
Keywords: discourse theory ■ human-nature relationships ■ ecocentrism ■ anthropocentrism ■ television fiction ■ supernatural