The discursive production and impairment of public trust through rhetorical representations of science: the case of global climate change (original) (raw)

2013

Abstract

For the last eight years I have been observing the continuing public debate over global climate change as it plays out daily across a multiplicity of internet-published texts on the Web. This research has focused on argumentative texts — that is, texts taking a clear position on an issue of contention, with a claim and supporting evidence — produced by social actors intensively engaged in the climate-change debate. In earlier work (2011) using Maarten Hajer’s (2005) ‘argumentative discourse analysis’ approach to analyse a large corpus of internet-published texts, including articles from news websites, blogs, and online reports and press releases from environmental groups, think-tanks, and other organisations, I identified two ‘discourse coalitions’ — clusters of social actors sharing a common ‘macro-argument’ (Toulmin 1959), or position, on climate change. I labelled one of these clusters of actors the ‘climate-change crisis discourse coalition’ (hereafter referred to as the ‘advoca...

Graham Smart hasn't uploaded this paper.

Let Graham know you want this paper to be uploaded.

Ask for this paper to be uploaded.