*CFP* "MEDIA AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE NORDIC JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

As a complex and systemic problem of collective action (in the Anthropocene), the climate crisis poses challenges on a new scale. They range from translating scientific knowledge to sustainable policy, from debating radical changes in energy supply and infrastructures to discussions of everyday consumer choices, from dialogues about identity and historical justice to the risks and scenarios of the future (which has gained ever more immediacy). 

Towards the end of the 2010s, the gap between hopeful scenarios and the real trajectories of climate change became increasingly severe. Politically, the short-lived optimism of the 2015 Paris Agreement waned under the pressure. As a result, national decision-making structures are weakened by a conjuncture of political polarisation where climate policies intersect with issues of immigration, identity, and inequality both between and within countries.The ambitious target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius seems to be slipping away – and the predictions of concerned scientists are increasingly pessimistic. At the same time, global media is filled with signs of the crisis: unforeseen fires, devastating floods and draughts – to name the obvious, dramatic examples – but also news of widening civic protests calling for climate action.

The climate emergency poses a fundamental challenge to the media, in all its contemporary plurality. The list of questions is long. How will the climate emergency shape the media institutions we inherited from carbon-driven modernity? What kind of professional practices and forms of reporting are needed? How will the new affordances of digital media networks enhance knowledge about the risks we face and help promote sharper critique of policies? What sort of opportunities for mediated activism for and against climate action will emerge? How will people use the wide array of media forms available today to make sense of their lives in the era of climate crisis? What is – or could be – the role of media studies in shaping this future?

The Nordic Journal of Media Studies is devoting its 2021 issue to cutting edge research tackling the role of the media (from social media to professional journalism and from everyday communication to high-level power politics) and the challenges of media research as a field in the context of the climate emergency. 

We welcome contributions with themes such as (but not limited to) the following (in no particular order):

• The role of time and temporality in climate communication
• Potentials and pitfalls of transnational media
• Visual communication and new forms of climate storytelling
• Negotiating climate justice, global inequalities, and solidarity
• Assessing different forms of knowledge and evidence (from complex models to indigenous knowledge)
• Extreme weather and climate reporting
• Translating between science, politics, media, and everyday practice
• Dynamics of networked, connective action and political participation
• Combating fake news in climate communication
• The role of political polarisation and populism – and concepts of countering them
• New alliances of coproduction in climate communication
• Role of language, argumentation, and rhetoric in climate coverage
• Comparative analyses of media reporting
• Relationships between media and climate policy (political decision making)
• The role of publics, audiences, and public opinion – and their measurement
• Potentials and pitfalls of targeted, strategic communication

We welcome contributions offering new empirical insight into these and other crucial nodal points of analysing, understanding, and innovating on the role of different media. Nordic Journal of Media Studies is not committed to any particular methods, materials, or theoretical approaches. We welcome suggestions for both empirical work that focuses on key moments of the contemporary media system but also hope to publish critical theoretical work that may help us to reconceptualise the urgent challenges of communicating the climate emergency.


Important dates

1 April 2020: Extended abstracts (1000 words), describing key questions, methods, data, and the phase in which the actual work  is in.

1 May 2020: Notification of accepted abstracts, with feedback from editors.

15 September 2020: Deadline for full manuscripts.


Contact: 

Risto Kunelius, University of Helsinki. E-mail: risto.kunelius@helsinki.fi

Anna Roosvall, Stockholm University. E-mail: anna.roosvall@ims.su.se