Emissions from Estate 4.0
How climate change coverage in new/social media reshapes the climate science-policy-public interactions in the 21st century
Mass media stitch together formal science and policy with everyday activities in the public sphere. Many dynamic, contested and complex factors contribute to how media outlets portray various facets of climate change. This proposed project seeks to better understand how issues, events and information have often become portrayed in the media around the world, through new and social media. The proposed project focuses attention on how interactions between science, media, policy and the public have contributed to perceptions understandings that, in turn, influence potential responses to climate challenges. These dynamics will be situated in the context of a wider ‘cultural politics of climate change’, where formal climate science and governance link with people’s everyday activities in the public sphere. Approached in this way, the proposed project explores how power flows through new/social media and shared as well as different cultures, politics, and societies, constructing knowledge, norms, and conventions about variegated dimensions of climate change. The proposed project will employ a mixed-method approach:
- Semi-structured interviews of journalists, academic researchers, policymakers and other non-nation state actors
- Discourse analysis – critical discourse analysis, content analysis – of new and social media representations of climate change
