Green States of Mind? Cognition, Emotion and Environmental Framing (original) (raw)
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2013
Franny Armstrong’s climate change-documentary The Age of Stupid (2009) presents itself as a film about ecological risk and environmental injustice in different geographical regions, while at the same time appealing strongly to our emotions by showing us something we are not yet able to see: the possibly catastrophic future consequences of our present behavior. Through the use of spatial and temporal framing, Armstrong creates a strong cognitive and affective link between the documentation of current social and environmental practices and the imagination of future ecological devastation. Drawing on cognitive film theory, the article investigate how The Age of Stupid mediates threatened ecological spaces and associated environmental risks in order to provoke strong affective and cognitive responses from viewers and, ideally, move them to action.
2018
This project uses critical discourse analysis to understand the relationship between U.S. news media coverage on natural disasters like Hurricane Inna and the ideological implications of that coverage. More specifically, in news media discourse, personification of natural disasters alienates humans from their actions, many of which are actively aiding in the advancement of anthropogenic climate change. By taking an in depth look at how various factors come into play, like the humans vs. nature binary, the polarization of American politics around climate change, and various news media framings, the essay demonstrates that the personification of Inna is both the result of and reinforcement of climate change misrepresentation in news media.
Visualizing Climate Change: Television News and Ecological Citizenship
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Television images can provide powerful symbols of ecological disaster. As Ulrich Beck notes (2009: 86) the catastrophic consequences of climate change must be made visible not only to enhance understanding but also to generate pressure for action. Taking its cue from current social theoretical ideas about media and ecological citizenship and Beck’s writings on the ‘symbolic politics of the media’, we set out to empirically examine the nature of climate change visualization within television news. We explore two analytically distinct dimensions of news visualisation: images, scenes and spectacular images of nature(s), places and people as under threat; and how accessed strategic relations of contention are visually infused with signs of trust and credibility. To better understand the contribution of the news media to ecological citizenship, we argue, we must attend to both these visual rhetorics and examine how each enters into the public representation, elaboration and now deepening...
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative
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Transforming the stories we tell about climate change: from ‘issue’ to ‘action’
Environmental Research Letters, 2020
By some counts, up to 98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature. Implicit in this number is the conventional wisdom among many communicators that increasing people’s understanding, awareness, concern or even fear of climate change are necessary precursors for action and behavior change. In this article we review scientific theories of mind and brain that explain why this conventional view is flawed. In real life, the relationship between beliefs and behavior often goes in the opposite direction: our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowinghowto act. One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action by providing...
Bridging the Political Deficit: Loss, Morality, and Agency in Films Addressing Climate Change
in Culture, Communication & Critique 2014 This article examines the emotional rhetorical strategies of 3 films—The Day After Tomorrow (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009)—that attempt to create engagements with the “postpolitical” problem of climate change. In all 3 films the experience of personal loss, the potential for future loss, and the emotions associated with loss are fundamental to affective engagement. The emotional loading of representations of environmental problems derives partly from concerns about human political agency and subjectivity. It is not so much that emotional or moral appeals are simply added on in order to bolster a political message, but rather that autobiographical narratives of loss and morality occupy the space once dominated by modernist forms of politics.
Claims of hope and disasters: rhetoric expression in three climate change documentaries
Studies in Documentary Film, 2014
ABSTRACT There has been a boom in the number of political documentaries since 9/11. Quite often, the form of these documentaries has been rhetorical. They seek to argue, prove, demonstrate and convince the audience about a particular point. This article studies rhetorical forms and rhetorical expressions in documentary films using as an example three documentaries about climate change. Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) looks like an illustrated lesson, but includes also the personal story of Al Gore. Not Evil, Just Wrong (2009) by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer is an anti-environmentalist film, which denies the existence of global warming. John Webster's Recipes for Disaster (2008) is using clear narrative form and follows the filmmaker's family trying to cope for one year without oil. The methods of classical rhetoric are adapted to analyse these films. Besides argumentation (logos), also emotions (pathos) and matters connected to credibility (ethos) are essential. Guggenheim's film is also adopting features of monomyth by Joseph Campbell and hero's journey by Christopher Vogler. Webster's main character can be seen through old Christian myth of everyman. In documentary film rhetoric, narrative and other means of expression intertwine with each other. Rhetorical means can be part of the story and sometimes a story can be the best way to make an argument, as in Webster's case. It can be difficult to isolate rhetorical means from other narrative styles and cinematic elements and levels. Rhetorical documentary film is an organic entity.