Biography
Thomas Patrick Pringle researches the relationship between media technology, culture and the environment. Before joining Tulane as an assistant professor of environmental communication, he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago and received a PhD in modern culture and media from Brown University. Pringle has held research fellowships with the SenseLab at Concordia, the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His research focuses on historical case studies that show how the production and circulation of documentary and digital media participates in political contests of ecological knowledge, especially instances shaped by considerations of risk, inequality and state violence. Pringle’s book in progress, The Climate Proxy, develops this approach by analyzing the mediation of climate crises in Canada, the United States and South Africa, such as wildfires and droughts. Considering how communities and institutions use digital media to depict these crises, the book explains how a climate comes to be known as an economic, security or health risk. This work reflects Pringle’s interest in the historical relationships between capitalism, empire and what counts as an environment in a given place and time. His writing appears in Journal of Film and Video, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and a book, Machine (2019, Minnesota UP) — co-authored with Bernard Stiegler and Gertrud Koch.
