Announcements

Media Analysis and Climate Change Communication Talks by Max Boykoff

June 20, 2011

On July 14, Max Boykoff will give a talk at University of Oxford on "Who speaks for climate? Making sense of media reporting on climate change". See event website for more details.

Talk desription: Mass media serve vital roles in communication processes between science, policy and the public, and often stitch together perceptions, intentions, considerations, and actions regarding climate change. Many dynamic, contested and complex factors contribute to how media outlets portray various facets of climate change.

This talk will touch on salient and swirling contextual factors as well as competing journalistic pressures and norms that contribute to how issues, events and information have often become climate ‘news’. Dr Boykoff will specifically focus attention on how particular problems and snags in the web of interaction between science, media, policy and the public have contributed to critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings – that are detrimental to efforts that seek to enlarge rather than constrict the spectrum of possibility for responses to climate challenges. Finally, he will work to situate these dynamics 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.

On June 20, Max Boykoff also gave a talk at the 'International Climate Communication Summit' sponsored by Greenpeace. His talk was on "What Media Analysis Can Tell Us About Effective Climate Change Communications".