Environmental Communication at a Time of Planetary Crisis: Five Theoretical and Analytical Resources for Academic Research and Practice

Authors

  • Trish Morgan Dublin City University

Keywords:

environment, communication, media, culture, journalism, novel approaches, transdisciplinary

Abstract

This article draws on transdisciplinary perspectives to contend that attention needs to be paid to contemporary contexts of environmental communication, especially in light of the latest assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Amid stark warnings around planetary crisis, this article provides environmental communication scholars, academics, and practitioners who are concerned with communicating aspects of deepening environmental crisis, a set of theoretical and analytical resources for the analysis and communication of environmental issues. Communicating environmental issues requires an expanded set of transdisciplinary approaches to move beyond a focus on representation of issues. To this end, the article draws on interdisciplinary bodies of knowledge from geography and communications to provide a set of reinforcing and complementary theoretical and analytical insights that are generally absent in the field of environmental communication. The article contends that attention needs to be paid to transdisciplinary perspectives, ontological, structural, and material challenges, and to the salience of other media, including digital and emerging media. The article thus provides five transdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual resources that expand the dimensions of environmental communication.

Author Biography

Trish Morgan, Dublin City University

Trish Morgan is an assistant professor in the school of Communications at Dublin City University. Her work approaches the communication of environmental issues through an interdisciplinary perspective from the domains of geography and communications. Her central research interest is in the novel communication of the nature/society relationship through theory and practice-based approaches. She has completed two EPA-funded research projects concerning the communication of environmental matters and the role of communications in behaviour change towards sustainability. She has most recently completed the project Sensing our world: How digital media cultural practices can contribute to changing social norms around consumption. This project focused on the role of novel forms of communicating environmental data.  This follows on from a previous EPA-funded research project, titled Going Green Digitally? Environmental Crisis, Consumption Patterns and the Evolving Role of Media. This project centred on mainstream media and their role in fostering discourse and behaviour change around consumption practices and ecological sustainability.

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Published

2022-10-29

Issue

Vol. 16 (2022)

Section

Articles

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