This edited collection emerged due to a shared sense amongst the editors that more needed to be said about how cinematic ethics is intertwined with the sociopolitical. This sense arose from the observation of a growing focus on this topic within the field, as seen in, for example, recent conference papers and publications in journals focusing on film-philosophy. With the turn to ethics in scholarship at the interdisciplinary intersection of film and philosophy now firmly established, it became clear that we should foreground the complex contextualisations, associations, imbrications, combinations and assemblages combining the ethical with the sociopolitical. Alongside this realisation was the growing awareness that cinematic ethics also requires a broader understanding of screen ethics to include examples of screen media ‘types’ which proliferate in our media-saturated world. Not a provincialising of cinematic ethics, but a recognition of the need to broaden the panorama to include television, digital media, virtual reality technology, and so on.

The contributions in Contemporary Screen Ethics together indicate how political the examination of screen ethics is. The manifestation of such politics, however, typically focus on the sociopolitical as opposed to the political strictly speaking (as in the politics of government, for example). Thus, collected in this anthology are chapters which examine screen ethics in relation to a range of topics which can be understood to be sociopolitical. It is worth outlining a few examples.

Feminist-informed explorations of screen ethics herein lead to three distinct contexts. First, considerations of decolonial analysis of the figure of the housemaid in a range of Brazilian cinematic genres and modes (intersectionally considering gender, race and class), which gesture towards an ethics of relationality that could be more inclusive of such otherwise marginalised figures. Second, the teasing out of what an ethics of care might look like in terms of documentary filmmaking practice, once more recognising of the nuanced intersectional nature of such practices and their subjects. Third, the affective nature of the ethical gaze when films explore sexual and gendered violence in the media and film industries.

We might equally consider the various approaches to race which open up discussion of, for instance, how televised stand-up comedy can make an ethicopolitical intervention into the circulation of stereotypes, or, how popular genre films may encourage people to ethically encounter otherness anew in a context which has normalised alignment with a constructed, racialised gaze.