Newly arrived from her last teaching position in Toronto, Canada, the new professor of Film and Digital Media (FDM), Selmin Kara, has lived in three separate countries. She is bringing the University of California, Santa Cruz her knowledge of contemporary media in a post-cinematic world.
Kara is originally from Turkey, where her father was a farmer and her mother was a professor. Nature played an integral role in Kara’s childhood, and continues to be one of her major passions today. One of her main research interests is eco-media, a dedication which she carries into her personal life through activities such as gardening.
After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in translation studies, Kara found herself working at a documentary production agency in Istanbul. “When I started working in the production of documentaries, I knew I really loved it,” she says. “I wanted to learn a little bit about the field, so I decided to do a Master’s.”
Her newfound passion for film led to a love for documentary theory, and she decided to pursue her Ph.D. in Detroit. Kara stayed in the United States for seven years before moving to Canada, where she stayed for another 13 years. She taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), which is one of Canada’s largest universities of art and design. However, OCAD was still fairly small compared to other universities, and didn’t include any Ph.D. programs.
When Kara decided to apply for her role at UC Santa Cruz: “I just gave it a shot, and it happened.” She was drawn in by the school’s commitment to environmentalism and FDM’s dedication to documentary research.
Her work has a strong emphasis on Anthropocene discourse, an informal field of study that looks at humans’ impact on the environment. In her free time she does pollinator gardening as activism. In Canada she received grants to reintroduce native plants through neighborhood gardens. Now that she’s in Santa Cruz, she sees the need more for preservation of nature than for the introduction of new plants.
Along with environmentalism, she will be exploring modern forms of media and how they interact with each other. “Post-cinematic theory looks at how media makes esthetics for different media, like how documentaries incorporate gaming, AR, VR,” says Kara.
She believes her contemporary research into media will also cater to the ever-younger student body. “In the classroom, when you’re teaching those things you’re having a conversation about the world and where we see ourselves headed towards. And I think the students always have that kind of really current perspective.”