From Debris to Sediment: Unearthing Imperial Geologiesedited by Felix Hasebrink and Petra Löffler. Lüneburg: meson press, 2026.

In geology, the term sediment refers to organic or mineral particles that were set in motion and transported to a new location by air, water, or ice. Today, new sediments are emerging that challenge traditional concepts of geological processes: the global spread of microplastics, the contamination of soil and water with toxins, infrastructural remainders of industrial manufacturing, or the material legacies of imperial and/or colonial resource extraction.

From Debris to Sediment addresses the rising relevance of these residues. From the perspective of media studies, geography, sociology, environmental sciences, and artistic research, the contributions to this volume deal with key sites and issues related to the mounting layers of anthropogenic refuse and explore sediments as a geo-philosophical figure of thought. What media, politics, and ecologies are implicated in accumulating "future fossils"? And how do they envision the new material cycles emerging from these growing deposits?

"Sticky Screens between Resistance and Cooperation", Marie Sophie Beckmann in: Kerim Doğruel/Fadekemi Olawoye/Clara Podlesnigg (eds.), Sticky Films: Material and Conceptual Explorations. Lüneburg: meson press, 2025

Sticky Films brings the material and conceptual dimensions of stickiness into conversation, looking for intentional and sometimes unwanted sticky residues in film and media cultures. The chapters explore the feelings of stickiness, sticky modes of being, as well as representations or traces of stickiness in audiovisual media.

Films That Spill: Beyond the Cinema of TransgressionMarie Sophie Beckmann. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2025.

Films That Spill is a comprehensive study of the Cinema of Transgression, a hitherto underexamined moment in US underground film culture. Reconsidering the concept of transgressive cinema not only as a description of the intentionally provocative content of the films but also as a feature of a cross-disciplinary practice, Marie Sophie Beckmann explores how filmmaking in the context of the vibrant and intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes in 1980s Lower Manhattan spilled over the boundaries of artistic disciplines, media formats, and content concepts.

Listening to voices. Knowledge practices and restitutive options of colonial sound documents. Jakob Claus in: Journal for Media Studies. Vol. 16, Issue 31 (2/2024): Sound Archive, 20-32.

The article questions media practices of phonographic knowledge production in the context of German colonial ethnography. Two recordings from Micronesia made in the course of ethnographic expeditions are analysed in a "close listening". The historical sound documents are understood as circulating and complex archival objects and analysed in terms of their recording context and contemporary mediality.

Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from Belowedited by Marie Sophie Beckmann and Petra Löffler, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2025.

Whether it is the ocean, the ground or soil, a metaphorical or symbolic underworld or a political figure of thought, the subsurface intervenes in recent debates about ecological, social and postcolonial conflicts and power inequalities in the humanities and beyond. However, turning to the unstable grounds of the subterranean always involves a conceptual or methodological movement and a practice of submersion, and thus a critical reflection on the conditions, technologies, aesthetics and politics of knowledge production.

"Not the First Time: Asymmetrical Knowledge between Media Circulation and Colonial Archive", Jakob Claus in: Charlotte Bolwin, Jasmin Degeling, Gabriel Geffer et al. (eds.): Scenes of Critical Relationality, Lüneburg: meson press, 2024, pp. 55-76.

Critical relationality intervenes in orders of thought that have designed critique as an operation of separating and keeping apart and thus shaped the modern dualisms of human and non-human, subjects and objects, organic and technical, nature and culture. Based on multiple, entangled crises, the contributions in this volume seek out concrete scenes in which the critical potential of connections and entanglements becomes clear.

"Leafing through the underground: A look back at the Cologne underground film initiative XSCREEN (1968-1971)"

Marie Sophie Beckmann in: Jörgen Schäfer/Georg Stanitzek (eds.), Neue Sensibilität: Vorschläge zu einem Kanon. Munich: edition text+kritik, 2024, pp.101-124.

Records of Disaster. Media Infrastructures and Climate Change, edited by Jakob Claus and Petra Löffler. Lüneburg: meson press 2022.

What connects melting glaciers and the knowledge from ice cores to the mapping of the ocean floor and the extraction of resources in the deep-sea? Records of Disaster proposes an analytical perspective on infrastructures as multi-layered witnesses to climate change.

"Overflow/Containment: The Messiness of the Cinema of Transgression"

Marie Sophie Beckmann in: Montage AV 31, 1 (2022), pp. 77-100.

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times. A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, edited by Petra Löffler and Réka Patrícia Gál. Lüneburg: meson press 2021.

This volume addresses the urgent geopolitical and environmental questions raised by the new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.

"Ökologien medialer Praktiken", Petra Löffler, in: Sebastian Gießmann, Tobias Röhl, Ronja Trischler (eds.): Materialität der Kooperation, Berlin: De Gryuter 2019, pp. 373-398.

The concept of an 'ecology of practices' was coined by feminist science theorist Isabelle Stengers and has been continuously developed for more than twenty years. She already used it in her seven-volume study Cosmopolitiques, published in 1997, to outline the emergence and coexistence of acting entities in scientific experimental cultures. For her, these heterogeneous actors only attain identity and stability in a network of relations that gives rise to heterogeneous modes of existence and practices.

"Archives of the future? A conversation about collection policies, colonial archives and the decolonisation of knowledge", Petra Löffler, Brigitta Kuster and Britta Lange, in: ZfM 20 (2019), pp. 96-111.

Brigitta Kuster and Britta Lange have long been researching and publishing on sensitive collections, colonial heritage, archiving processes and exhibition practices. They talk to Petra Löffler about the possibilities and risks of a different archive policy in the future and about the relationship between the materiality and mediality of archives.

Distributing images. Photographic practices in digital culture, edited by Winfried Gerling, Susanne Holschbach and Petra Löffler. Bielefeld: transcript 2018.

Digital photographs are omnipresent: they are created, distributed, commented on and stored billions of times a day. In conjunction with digital technologies and social networks, practices have emerged that have radically changed the production and reception, distribution and archiving of photographic images. They are distributed, organised and evaluated by their prosumers as well as by machines, software and algorithms.

Ecologies of the Earth - History and Topicality of the Gaia Hypothesis, edited by Alexander Friedrich, Petra Löffler, Niklas Schrape and Florian Sprenger. Lüneburg: meson press 2018.

Ecologies of the earth determine the present. The Gaia theory developed by James Lovelock together with Lynn Margulis in the 1970s is now gaining new explanatory power. When Gaia even becomes Bruno Latour's general model for explaining the world in the 21st century, it is important to ask about the plausibility that Gaia's discourse is currently developing.

Media Ecology. Issue of the Journal of Media Studies, Petra Löffler and Florian Sprenger (eds.), 14 (2016).

The relationship between technology, culture and nature is up for debate, and with it a number of basic concepts of media studies. Based on this realisation, approaches are emerging that ask about the systematic use and historical role of media ecologies. However, what is meant by this, how the relationship between media and ecology could be conceptualised, what plausibilities ecology has for media studies and what objects media studies is able to grasp ecologically is rarely looked at more closely. The 14th issue of the Journal of Media Studies, focussing on "Media Ecology", sets out to map areas of possible media ecologies from a historical and systematic perspective.