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  • Mediating climate change

Mediating climate change

Climate change is the most urgent and pressing issue of our time, yet the gap between our understanding of this issue, and action taken to address it, continues to widen. Why is this the case? Climate change is not simply a scientific issue; how we communicate about this issue affects our perceptions, actively shaping how governments, businesses and citizens are called upon to take action, or not.

Surprisingly, media and cultural studies scholars have been slow to address the communicative and cultural dimensions of climate change, even though media and culture play a key role in shaping the way we understand these issues. This book both identifies and redresses this lack, focusing upon the ways in which climate change is mediated – and thus made meaningful - through key representational and discursive practices from within and across science, media, politics and culture. Whilst its focus and case studies are drawn from a north western perspective, it also critiques this perspective.

Mediating Climate Change is only the second monograph (after Mike Hulme’s, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, 2009) to interrogate the cultural dimensions of climate change. Through a focus upon the key social and political actors that have been involved in climate communication since the 1970s, it firstly examines how, historically, scientists, mainstream media, and environmentalists have discursively framed this issue. Acknowledging the temporal and spatial complexities of climate change, and its relative invisibility, this book thus examines how climate change is mediated and visualised through the images and texts produced by these different actors. It finds that climate change is often represented, problematically, as a distant and future threat, rather than a risk in the here and now. Secondly, it moves on to examine contemporary efforts to make climate meaningful – for example, via the activities of a more diverse climate movement, through NGO campaigns around meat and dairy consumption, and through the visual arts. In doing so, it argues that climate change needs to be linked to the human and the everyday.

Mediating-climate-book-cover

Project aims

The project aims

  • To redress the lack of scholarly focus upon the cultural and communicative dimensions of climate change through a critical analysis of how images and texts, drawn from science, media, politics and culture, mediate and frame climate change.
  • To analyse how climate change, as a temporally and spatially complex issue, has been historically mediated through the representational practices of science, environmentalism and media.
  • Through this historical analysis, provide a theoretical framework which identifies how the interrelated and dominant concepts of nature, vision and time (utilised by science, media and environmentalism) have problematically represented and framed climate change as a distant, future and non-human issue.
  • From this theoretical framework, explore how contemporary case studies drawn from climate activism, media coverage of climate events, NGO campaigning on meat and dairy consumption, and the visual arts, negotiate these representational difficulties in efforts to make climate meaningful to our everyday practices.
  • To identify and acknowledge the representational difficulties climate change poses, and in doing so make recommendations for climate change to be more meaningfully linked to the cultural and social practices of our everyday lives, in the here and now.

Project findings and impact

Mediating Climate Change critically analysed both the historical and contemporary representations of climate change within and across science, media, politics and popular culture. Firstly, it explored the problems climate change has posed for knowledge, communication and action.

Through an analysis of contemporary mediated communication on climate change, including an emerging climate movement, print news media, civil society groups and visual artists, Mediating Climate Change explored how climate change is being made culturally meaningful through a range of discursive and social practices. It found that climate change is variously framed through appeals to discourses of justice, faith, scientific certainty, ethics, emotion and morality to engage people on climate change and promote positive action. At the same time, discourses of scientific uncertainty, neoliberalism, (ir)rationality, individualism and anti-environmentalism have been used to promote inaction.

The book argues that there is not one way to communicate climate change more effectively, nor one form of action to be undertaken. However, communication on climate change needs to be compelling and convey the urgency of this issue. In doing so, climate communication needs to explain the temporal, invisible and incremental nature of climate change, as well as the uncertainties of climate science in relation to its magnitude, rapidity of change and geographical specificity, as a basis for action in the present. Communication needs to engage people in ways that are meaningful to them, and to encourage the efficacy of different modes of self and collective action. In letting go of nature, as it has come to be constructed through western knowledge systems, we can hope to connect and engage with climate change in a way that acknowledges its embeddedness in our everyday lives, encouraging a change in our perceptions and our actions.

Impact:

The book has also led to a number of external invitations to speak on climate change communication to a variety non-academic audiences, including NGOs, arts, governments and mainstream media. Details of these are in the table below.

Research team

Professor Julie Doyle

 

Output

Monograph. Doyle, Julie (2011) Mediating Climate Change. Abingdon: Ashgate.

Impact

Greenpeace Germany. Invited workshop speaker on ‘Imaging Climate Change’, Greenpeace Climate Workshop, Greenpeace Germany, Hamburg, 18-19 June 2013.

Greenpeace UK. Invitation to speak to all staff on climate change communication, Greenpeace UK. London, 20 November 2013.

Following Julie's talk at Greenpeace UK (November 2013), invited collaboration with Greenpeace UK to create a climate communication at Glastonbury Festival competition for University of Brighton media students. Students were invited to present proposals for communicating Greenpeace’s ‘Save the Arctic’ campaign through visual, sonic and multimedia methods. Two BA (Hons) Environment and Media Studies students won the competition and helped create their artwork in the Greenpeace Field at Glastonbury. February – June 2014.

Invited participant for ‘Communicating climate change through visualisation’ workshop, Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland and the University of Exeter Medical School European Centre for Environment and Human Health, Cornwall, 15-17 May 2014. Participants drawn from academia (natural and social sciences), business and government (Ireland and UK). www.ecehh.org/events/visualising-climate/

Invited panel member, The Guardian. ‘Live Q&A: How can culture and sport inspire climate action?’, 15 January 2015. www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/15/live-qa-how-can-culture-and-sport-inspire-climate-action

Julie Doyle in public conversation with Melanie Wilson, creator of Opera for the Unknown Woman (Fuel Theatre Company), a performance about climate change and feminism. ONCA Gallery, Brighton, 14 April 7.00pm.

Invited Committee Member and Co-Judge, International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Climate Communication Research Award iamcr.org/awards/climate-comm-2015

Invited Keynote address. ‘Climate change imagery and science communication’. 5th national Conference on Climate Change Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, 12-16 October 2015. Conference aimed at academia, practitioners and NGOs.

Reviews

'This is an insightful volume that challenges us to unpack and reconsider ways in which climate change becomes meaningful in our lives. In particular, author Julie Doyle has insightfully explored how imagery shapes our understanding, and how food consumption matters to mitigation efforts. Overall, Doyle has asked novel and productive questions that advance our shared considerations of climate and society.'
  - Maxwell T. Boykoff, University of Colorado-Boulder, USA



'How people think and feel about the idea of climate change influences the way they evaluate and act on the facts of climate change. In Mediating Climate Change, Julie Doyle examines this simple but important proposition and explains why and how this can be. Doyle’s focus on the multiple meanings of climate change, and how these can (dis)empower, is a necessary correction to the inconclusive and tiresome arguments about scientific (un)certainties which plague public debates. In so doing, Mediating Climate Change contributes to a much bigger and more profound project: reconnecting the human faculty of imagination and the material consequences of human action.'
- Mike Hulme, Kings College London, UK

‘Doyle argues persuasively that climate change communication in its various forms is indebted to visual discourse, and that the dominant visual forms (namely graphs, charts, photographs and videos) are paradoxical in the way they construct climate knowledge and lend it authority whilst simultaneously constraining our ability to really understand the multi-faceted phenomenon of climate change. Her analyses of the relationship in modern scientific thought between visibility and truth claims, and between enlightenment conceptions of nature, vision and time are especially insightful… this is a thought-provoking and erudite book, which will certainly be of interest to readers of this journal. I recommend it highly.'
 - Kate Manzo, Environmental Values

'This fascinating new work from media studies scholar Julie Doyle addresses a central question which has long vexed science communicators - how to make climate change meaningful; relevant to people’s everyday lives and social practices. This is not, however, a guidebook for the communication of a complex technoscientific issue. Rather, Doyle presents us with a nuanced, thoughtful argument about the difficulties in mediating between scientific assertions and our capacities for imagination, narrative and creative engagement… This book is significant in its invitation to move beyond the linear idea of “communication” towards a dialogic notion of “mediation”… Doyle’s work is sure to inspire much discussion about the complex ways in which meaning is negotiated between diverse social actors in diverse places, rather than being simply “handed-down” by authoritative cultural entities. Processes of mediation intrinsically involve relational and indexical co-productions of meaning, and we are thus left to ponder the relationship between meaning-making and social action, in addition to the many ways in which “mediation” is a welcome addition to discussions of science communication and public understandings.'
- Martin Mahony, Public Understanding of Science



'Doyle usefully breaks from earlier studies that have viewed the barriers to the effective communication of climate change as the same as those for other environmental problems… A strength of the book […] is the detailed and insightful analysis that Doyle offers of the techno-scientific methods and technologies used to quantify and define climate change in line with the practice of science in Western developed economies… Mediating Climate Change provides a worthwhile introduction to the expanding field of media studies of climate change, and one that advantageously abandons the framing of climate change as a purely environmental issue in favour of an approach that considers human angles and the efforts of a wide range of activist groups as well as mainstream media.'
- Alanna Myers, Communication, Politics & Culture


'I warmly recommend the book. The many different perspectives on one topic make the book very useful in teaching. Firstly, because it demonstrates that even if society has one shared agenda, the actors in the media eco system each add their own perspective to the communication process and no single actor has the power to control the message. This is good from a democratic perspective. Secondly, the collection of analyses draws on many different theories and research techniques that students can discuss and be inspired by, including theories from cultural and media studies, cultural geography, and social science. And hopefully it will provoke students to engage in a productive and highly relevant discussion about the many different aspects of mass communication.'
 - Kirsten Mogensen, MedieKultur

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