The Cultural Framing of Environmental Discourse
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bath
Department Name: Politics, Languages and Int Studies
Abstract
The bid is for a multidisciplinary network to examine the cultural framing of environmental discourse. The Humanities have an important contribution to make to addressing the challenges of climate change and the loss of biodiversity, through examining perceptions and understandings of the natural world and their communication in language and visual images. Research on environmental discourse has so far tended to neglect issues of personal motivation, and the role played by cultural tradition, rhetorical strategies, and conceptions of local belonging in generating a sense of responsibility for the environment. Literary, filmic and artistic discourse on the environment play an important role in mediating between knowledge of environmental problems and threats and actual choices in everyday life. Interdisciplinary research in this area and into the potential of literature, the visual arts and museums to contribute to environmental literacy has an important contribution to make to both mitigating and accommodating to environmental changes. The project will build on perspectives recently developed by Heise and others in seeking to bring literary critics into significant dialogue with representatives of social science disciplines researching environmental communication and with practitioners in science and social policy. Three workshops will be held, and the findings will be published on a dedicated website.
Planned Impact
The proposed network will seek to realise the considerable potential for public interest that this important issue deserves by engaging with the general public, teachers/ educationalists, and groups of practitioners (writers, film makers, museum curators).
The general public will be approached in collaboration with the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, which has a long record of providing effective support and dissemination for science and the arts in the Bath and Bristol area, and makes a perfect partner. The public will be further engaged through collaboration with the Bath Literature Festival, whose Director has expressed interest in making the environment a theme to be explored in readings and public lectures in the February/March 2011 Festival.
Impact on teachers and educationalists will be sought through the project website. The network members will actively publicise this resource through their academic and professional associations in the UK and the wider world, which will be made as user-friendly as possible through structuring so as to address the needs of teachers.
Writers will be engaged through the readings at the Bath Literature Festival mentioned above; film makers through contact with the Bristol-based charity and festival organiser Wildscreen; museum curators including those at the BRLSI, and in Tyne and Wear will be approached to explore the possibility of exhibitions on the environment and museum conferences on themes such as 'Extinct Species'.
The general public will be approached in collaboration with the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, which has a long record of providing effective support and dissemination for science and the arts in the Bath and Bristol area, and makes a perfect partner. The public will be further engaged through collaboration with the Bath Literature Festival, whose Director has expressed interest in making the environment a theme to be explored in readings and public lectures in the February/March 2011 Festival.
Impact on teachers and educationalists will be sought through the project website. The network members will actively publicise this resource through their academic and professional associations in the UK and the wider world, which will be made as user-friendly as possible through structuring so as to address the needs of teachers.
Writers will be engaged through the readings at the Bath Literature Festival mentioned above; film makers through contact with the Bristol-based charity and festival organiser Wildscreen; museum curators including those at the BRLSI, and in Tyne and Wear will be approached to explore the possibility of exhibitions on the environment and museum conferences on themes such as 'Extinct Species'.
| Description | The network brought together colleagues working on environmental discourse in a range of disciplines in the UK, Europe and America (English and Comparative Literature, History, Communication and Media Studies, Film, Art, Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Sociology and Education). It established the ability of Framing to serve as a conceptual focus for comparative analysis of the differing (and shifting) perceptions of environmental change across a range of disciplines, and to throw light on the ways in which today's environmental challenges are perceived and communicated by social actors such as governments and political parties, industry and environmental pressure groups, the media, writers and artists. Practitioners in TV, film, environmental consultancy and creative writing were involved, and the local public was engaged in meetings advertised as part of the BRLSI's and Bath Literature Festival's lecture programme. The relative status of literary, journalistic, political and scientific narratives of environmental change and their respective significance for visions of the future, for education and for environmental policy were addressed in individual papers. |
| Exploitation Route | The findings have the ability to inform environmental education by indicating how awareness of the framing of environmental issues can be taught, and ultimately to inform policy making by revealing the shaping power of cultural narratives. |
| Sectors | Environment,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | The PI was invited to lead workshops on Frame Analysis for Swedish Doctoral Training Courses in the Humanities organised by NIES in Sigtuna (September 2011) and Lund (January 2012). The network's findings were expanded on in further conference presentations, a journal article and a book chapter by the PI. They have fed into recent publications on ecopedagogy, and inspired the international conference 'Framing Nature: Signs, Stories and Ecologies of Meaning' (Tartu, April 2014). They are being developed as a methodological framework in the AHRC project 'Stories of Change: The past, present and future of energy'. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
| Sector | Education,Environment |
| Impact Types | Societal |