Communication and political imaginaries on climate change: From eco-modernism to deep democratization
With: Anabela Carvalho, University of Minho
This seminar is presented in collaboration between the Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies, Humlab and UTRI.
Abstract
Despite an increasingly dire outlook, over the past few decades pathways to address climate change have been largely constrained within the logic of market economics, which has proven inadequate. Dominant discourses have legitimized and naturalized specific policy options, facilitating their institutionalization and material expansion while simultaneously narrowing the horizon of possibilities. Ecological modernization and the green economy, for example, frame climate change as a matter of commodification and technocratic management, thereby obscuring structural and power-related drivers and reinforcing neoliberal economic assumptions. These perspectives have been amplified by political elites and widely reproduced across mainstream media. At the same time, strategies of denialism and evasion—particularly from fossil fuel corporations—have worked to appropriate the debate and delay transformative action. Together, these dynamics have fostered what may be described as a post-political deadlock, in which hegemonic claims that “there is no alternative” foreclose democratic contestation. At the same time, in a context of growing inequalities and aggravated environmental injustices, feelings of political powerlessness and fatalism among citizens create fertile ground for authoritarian and populist tendencies. This seminar will critically examine these discursive formations while also exploring alternative sociotechnical and political imaginaries that could open possibilities for social transformation and the redemocratization of climate politics.
Bio
Anabela Carvalho (PhD, University College London) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Minho, Portugal. She has an extensive experience of research on climate change communication and has authored influential analyses of the discourses of various social actors and the media in the United Kingdom, Portugal and other countries. Citizens’ engagement with climate change and (bio-)sustainability, and especially the conditions for political engagement, have been on of her main research interests.