Edited volume (Routledge)

Deadline: January 15, 2020

Temporal scales and perceptions of past, present and future diverge, clash and merge in complex ways when discussing and visualizing climate change. The “slow violence” (Nixon) of climate change, linked to a complicated and multi-sited history of extraction, has caused immediate and imminent devastation—or, what is now increasingly referred to as the “climate emergency” and “climate crisis”.

This intersection of quick ruptures with gradual, extended experiences of change are difficult to reconcile, especially by journalists and media-makers. Following on from that, this collection aims to reflect on the complex negotiations of temporal scales related to climate change and its mediations. Such negotiations emerge, for instance, in the temporalities related to the mediation of Greta Thunberg, which relate to geological time, its acceleration, tipping points, institutional temporalities of politics and journalism (and its possible acceleration), lifespans and generations as well as living memories of weather and related events. Such scales and perceptions are, furthermore, inscribed within more specific temporalities of media ideologies, ideologies and cultures in very different locales, which — at some level — all are written into the temporalities of global communication.

The broad aim of this volume is consequently to analyse the meetings of and schisms between various temporalities as they emerge within specific mediations of climate change in a diverse range of locations around the world. The collection thus seeks to understand how climate change as a temporal process gets inscribed within the temporalities of journalism, which inflect various local, regional, national and global times as well as various perceptions of change related to generations, (living) memory and (national) politics and how such perceptions are linked to the temporalities of globalisation, colonialism, race, gender and class. The aim of this collection is to free the thinking about climate change communication from science communication and/or social science approaches focusing on how climate communication can be improved (Chadwick) and, linked to that, how effects can be measured. Rather than being immediately focused on more efficient communication as determined and measured by an empiricist tradition, such critical cultural studies may help tease out important nuances of discourse and power that eventually can point towards different communicative practices.

Schedule:

• Date for submitting abstracts (max 300 words): January 15, 2020
• Answers with regard to acceptance: February 1.
• Deadline for first draft of chapters: May 1
• Deadline for editors’ comments to authors: June 15
• Deadline for final edited versions of chapters (7000-8000 words): August 1
• Publication: Autumn 2020.

Send abstracts to editors Henrik Bødker, Dept. of Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, hb@cc.au.dk; and to Hanna E. Morris, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA, hanna.morris@asc.upenn.edu