This collection of essays presents new formulations of ideas and practices within documentary media that respond critically to the multifaceted challenges of our age. As social media, augmented reality, and interactive technologies play an increasing role in the documentary landscape, new theorizations are needed to account for how such media both represents recent political, socio-historical, environmental, and representational shifts, and challenges the predominant approaches by promoting new critical sensibilities. The contributions to this volume approach the idea of "critical distance" in a documentary context and in subjects as diverse as documentary exhibitions, night photography, drone imagery, installation art, mobile media, nonhuman creative practices, sound art and interactive technologies. It is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students working in fields such as documentary studies, film studies, cultural studies, contemporary art history and digital media studies.

This collection of essays presents new formulations of ideas and practices within documentary media that respond critically to the multifaceted challenges of our age. As social media, augmented reality, and interactive technologies play an increasing role in the documentary landscape, new theorizations are needed to account for how such media both represents recent political, socio-historical, environmental, and representational shifts, and challenges the predominant approaches by promoting new critical sensibilities. The contributions to this volume approach the idea of "critical distance" in a documentary context and in subjects as diverse as documentary exhibitions, night photography, drone imagery, installation art, mobile media, nonhuman creative practices, sound art and interactive technologies. It is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students working in fields such as documentary studies, film studies, cultural studies, contemporary art history and digital media studies.

Wherever there have been nuclear weapons and nuclear fission, there have also been cameras. Camera Atomica explores the intimate relationship between photography and nuclear events, to uncover how the camera lens has shaped public perceptions of the atomic age and its anxieties. Photographs have a crucial place in the representation of the atomic age and its anxieties. Published in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario to coincide with a major exhibition there in 2014. Camera Atomica examines narratives beyond the "technological sublime" that dominates much nuclear photography, suppressing representations of the human form in favour of representations of B-52 bombers and mushroom clouds. The book proposes that the body is the site where the social environment interacts with the so-called "atomic road": uranium mining and processing, radiation research, nuclear reactor construction and operation, and weapons testing. Cameras have both recorded and - in certain instances - provided motivation for the production of nuclear events. Their histories and technological development are intimately intertwined. All photographs, including nuclear photographs, have the capability to function affectively by working on the emotions and fascinating audiences. Through a wide range of visual documentation, Camera Atomica raises questions such as: what has the role of photography been in underwriting a public image of the bomb and nuclear energy? Has the circulation of photographic images heightened or lessened anxieties, or done both at the same time? How should the different visual protocols of photography be understood?

This special issue of "TOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies" addresses the ubiquity of militarization, a presence that is woven into the very fabric of civic culture.Militarization is not just something that happens in war zones; when our government invests billions of dollars in war planes, prisons and the "digital economy," while starving resources in social justice, education, the environment and culture, we are living the consequences of global militarization. To talk about cultures of militarization is to talk about the terms in which collective identity is militarized and resistive forms of agency allowed and disallowed. By recognizing the human relations within capitalism and how these have come to be defined increasingly by military interests, we reveal that militarism is a global master narrative; military diction becomes inseparable from the language of power, sweeping aside human suffering as mere "collateral damage." We are led to believe that it is temporary, and we are compliant in our acceptance of these narratives.