This book offers comprehensive insights into the cultural and ecological values that influence sustainable development across Asia, addressing the cultural, religious and philosophical moorings of development through participatory and grassroots communication approaches. It presents a range of contributions and case studies from leading experts in Asia to highlight the debates on environmental communication and sustainable development that are relevant today, and to provide an overview of the positive traditions of ecological sensitivity and cultural communication that may find common ground between communities. This well-researched guide to the dynamic and complex terrain of communication for sustainable development offers uniquely practical perspectives on communication, environment and sustainable development that are of immense value for policy makers, media scholars, development practitioners, researchers and students of communication and media studies.
Communication about ‘the environment’ in and through a broad array of news, advertising, art and entertainment media is one of the major sources of public and political understanding of definitions, issues and problems associated with the environment. Environment, Media and Communication examines the social, cultural and political roles of the media as a public arena for images, representations, definitions and controversy regarding the environment. The book starts by discussing and outlining a framework for analyzing media and communication roles in the emergence of the environment and environmental problems as issues for public and political concern. It proceeds to examine who and what drives the public agenda on environmental issues, addressing questions about how governments, scientists, experts, pressure groups and other stakeholders have sought to use traditional as well as newer media for promoting their definitions of the key issues. The media are not merely an open public arena or stage, but rather themselves a key gate-keeper and influence in the process of communicating about the environment: the role of news values, organizational arrangements and professional practices, are thus examined next. Recognizing the importance of wider popular culture narratives to public understanding and communication about the environment and nature, the book proceeds with a discussion of the messages and moral tales communicated about the environment, science and nature in a range of media, including film and advertising media. It shows how this wider context provides important clues to understanding the successes and failures of selected environmental issues or campaigns. The book finishes with an examination of the key approaches and models used for understanding how the media influence and interact with public opinion and political decision-making on environmental issues. Offering a comprehensive introduction to theoretical approaches and models for the study of media and communication roles regarding the environment, and drawing on empirical research evidence and examples from Europe, America, Australia and Asia, the book will be of interest to students in media/communication studies, geography, environmental studies, political science and sociology as wll as to environmental professionals and activists.
An Ecology of Communication addresses an ecological and communicative dilemma: the universe, earth, and socio-cultural life world are resoundingly dialogic, yet we have created modern and postmodern cultures largely governed by monologue. This book is indispensable reading for scholars and students of communication, ecology, and social sciences, as it moves readers beyond the anthropocentric bias of communication study toward a listening-based model of communication, an essential move for discerning fitting responses and the call to responsibility in an age of ecocrisis.
Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with Media Logic and continued in Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era: that in our age, information technology and the communication enviroments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice., Articulated through an interactionist and non-deterministic focus, An Ecology of Communication offers a distinctive perspective for understanding the impact of information technology, communication formats, and social activities in the new electronic environment.
Media and communication processes are central to how we come to know about and make sense of our environment and to the ways in which environmental concerns are generated, elaborated, manipulated and contested. The second edition of Environment, Media and Communication builds on the first edition’s framework for analysing and understanding media and communication roles in the politics of the environment. It draws on the significant and continuing growth and advances in the field of environmental communication research to show the increasing diversification and complexity of environmental communication. The book highlights the persistent urgency of analysing and understanding how communication about the environment is being influenced and manipulated, with implications for how and indeed whether environmental challenges are being addressed and dealt with. Since the first edition, changes in media organisations, news media and environmental journalism have continued apace, but – perhaps more significantly – the media technologies and the media and communications landscape have evolved profoundly with the continued rise of digital and social media. Such changes have gone hand in hand with, and often facilitated, enabled and enhanced shifting balances of power in the politics of the environment. There is thus a greater need than ever to analyse and understand the roles of mediated public communication about the environment, and to ask critical questions about who/what benefits and who/what is adversely affected by such processes. This book will be of interest to students in media/communication studies, geography, environmental studies, political science and sociology as well as to environmental professionals and activists.
Violent Inheritance deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages—"land lines"—between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the "electric" climates of the Rocky Mountains to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities.
This volume interrogates the intertwining of the local and the digital in environmental communication. It starts by introducing a wave metaphor to tease out major shifts in the field, and situates the intersections of local places and digital networks in the beginning of a third wave. Investigations that feature the centrality of place and digital communication platforms show how we today, as researchers and practitioners, communicate the environment. Contributions identify the need for critical approaches that engage with the wider consequences of this changing media landscape, unpacking local and global tensions in environmental communication research. This empirical case study collection from different parts of the world shows that environmental activists and citizens creatively use digital technologies for campaign purposes. It identifies new environmental communication challenges and opportunities, as well as practices, of environmental activists, NGOs, citizens and local communities, in the fight for social and environmental justice.
Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown’s killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human.
How do we talk about the environment? Does this communication reveal and construct meaning? Is the environment expressed and foregrounded in the new landscape of digital media? The Environment in the Age of the Internet is an interdisciplinary collection that draws together research and answers from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Edited by Heike Graf, its focus is on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, shedding light on how these groups tell their distinctive stories of "the environment". This book draws on case studies from around the world and focuses on activists of radically different kinds: protestors against pulp mills in South America, resistance to mining in the Sámi region of Sweden, the struggles of indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon, gardening bloggers in northern Europe, and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany. Each case is examined in relation to its multifaceted media coverage, mainstream and digital, professional and amateur. Stories are told within a context; examining the "what" and "how" of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts determine communication, and how communication raises and shapes awareness. These issues have never been more urgent, this work never more timely. The Environment in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for everyone interested in how humans relate to their environment in the digital age.
This book draws on a broad spectrum of environmental communications and related cross-disciplinary literature to help students and scholars grasp the interconnecting key concepts within this ever-expanding field of study. Aligning climate change and environmental learning through media and communications, particularly taking into account the post-COVID challenge of sustainability, remains one of the most important concerns within environmental communications. Addressing this challenge, Essential Concepts for Environmental Communication synthesises summary writings from a broad range of environmental theorists, while teasing out provocative concepts and key ideas that frame this evolving, multi-disciplinary field. Each entry maps out an important concept or environmental idea and illustrates how it relates more broadly across the growing field of environmental communication debates. Included in this volume is a full section dedicated to exploring what environmental communication might look like in a post-COVID setting: • Offers cutting-edge analysis of the current state of environmental communications. • Presents an up-to-date exploration of environmental and sustainable development models at a local and global level. • Provides an in-depth exploration of key concepts across the ever-expanding environmental communications field. • Examines the interaction between environmental and media communications at all levels. • Provides a critical review of contemporary environmental communications literature and scholarship. With key bibliographical references and further reading included alongside the entries, this innovative and accessible volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners alike.
