Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Specialized graduate course offering on a topic related to the current research of school faculty or visiting professor.

COURSE DETAILS:

Over the past two decades, the field of environmental communication has expanded rapidly as awareness has grown of the critical role played by culture and communication in shaping the relationship between human societies and our ‘natural’ environment. 

On the one hand, culture and communication have played a major role in supporting the economic, social and political structures and institutions that have come to exploit and dominate ‘nature’ in a fundamentally unsustainable and increasingly catastrophic manner. Commercial and corporate media, for example, provide vital cultural and ideological support to ecologically devastating forms of capitalism, neoliberalism, economic growth and consumer culture while marginalizing the voices of those calling for a different relationship with the biosphere (or even those seeking to inform the public of environmental crisis). In addition to propagating misinformation about the climate crisis, social media shelter and incubate forms of far-right, authoritarian populism that defend carbon-intensive political economies and ways of life, and whip up resentment and outrage at those advancing more progressive policies. 

On the other hand, cultural and communicative processes can also provide the conceptual and emotional space to cultivate not only an awareness of environmental crisis but also (and more importantly) the social and political will to challenge existing structures of power and patterns of inequality, and inaugurate (and imagine) more sustainable forms of economy and society. The explosive recent growth of global climate and environmental justice movements is exemplary of this potential. Vigorous debates among scholars, practitioners and activists in the field about how to communicate more effectively with the public (as well as a strongly interdisciplinary theoretical orientation and research agenda) have produced a much richer understanding of the roles that affect, emotion, experience, identity, narrative, values, frames, practices, institutions and other elements can and must play in motivating increased public engagement with environmental issues. 

These issues are of particular consequence to the evolving social and political landscape in British Columbia where intense struggles over resource and infrastructure development coexist with a social and physical landscape increasingly subject to the devastating impacts of the climate crisis. While governments in Canada continue to support the expansion of carbon intensive extraction and export (alongside comparatively modest efforts to reduce domestic emissions), strong resistance movements have emerged, led by First Nations, local communities and environmental activists and advocates. Such efforts are supported by a rapidly growing alternative media ecology that is challenging the hegemony of corporate media and public relations in the information landscape. Our discussion of environmental communication will be informed by and rooted within this political and discursive context. Scholarship focused upon media and communication does constitute the principal focus for the seminar. CMNS 858 (Spring 2024, Gunster) 

However, the course also draws upon research from a range of relevant disciplines, including history, geography, psychology, sociology, political science and others. Past iterations of the course have included graduate students from across the university and this interdisciplinary composition of the seminar has broadened and enriched our discussions. I welcome the participation of students with an interest in how media and communication shapes how people and institutions engage with ecological crisis, climate change and the possibilities of building more equitable and sustainable futures. 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: