Scholars have argued that environmental discourse in general and climate change discourse in particular have contributed to a post-politicization of the public sphere, meaning there is now an absence of deeper conflicting viewpoints about the future direction of society; capitalism has been naturalized as the only conceivable option for the organization of socio-political-ecological life. The aim of the study is to empirically explore the ways in which the post-political condition of climate change is established in public discourse. Applying an ideology-theoretical approach to a focus-group study with Swedish citizens, the article analyzes how the post-politicization of the climate issue is shaped by 1) belief in a “climate threat,” 2) personal experiences of a “climate threat,” and 3) integration of a “climate threat” into everyday practices. We conclude that the post-politicization of climate change could be explained by a consensual discourse constituted by the particularization of climate change causes, a lack of passionate emotions, and “neurotic” micro-political action.
Modernity changed our social representations of suffering and death, which previous in history were present in everyday life. Today, those phenomena are institutionalised and hospitalised away from people’s homes and social life. The media, however, almost daily serve us intrusive pictures of victims of violence, of human suffering and brutal death. It is the distant suffering of strangers. This paper presents results from studies of citizens’ social representations of distant suffering and discusses two identity positions founded in ideology that arises in relation to the media reporting: national identity and global identity. At a macro level these positions can be related to the contradictory processes of globalisation, on the one hand the ideology of human rights and global compassion and on the other hand nationalism. The result underlines the important role played by the media in the complex processes of transformations of common sense knowledge.
The nature conservation movement frequently relies on the lustre of celebrity personae to reach out with its message. As role models, celebrities exercise invisible power by representing certain norms and ideas while themselves being subordinate to social structures and discourses. Examining the case of Conservation International’s campaign, Nature Is Speaking, and guided by the methodological framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this study examines how celebrities, in alliance with the conservation movement, (re)produce certain ideas about nature and the human-nature relationship when discursively ‘celebrifying’ nature – turning nature into a ‘celebrity by association’ – by lending their celebrity properties to nature as represented in the campaign. The study identifies three ways of representing nature that the celebrification of nature produces in the campaign: nature as (1) eternal and magnificent, (2) caring and providing, and (3) mighty but delicate. Together these representations constitute a discourse that reproduces certain naturalised values and worldviews connected to the human-nature relationship. The paper concludes that the diversification of celebrity into new fields such as the natural is constitutive of the overall celebritisation of society, and it discusses the implications of the celebrification of nature in terms of reproduction of the human-nature dichotomy and obscuration of the structural aspects of environmental degradation.
In this paper we explore the role of media industries in the realization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development. Based on prior research on media industries, the paper starts by outlining the established view of this complex business context and its contradictory objectives. We then systematize this in a tentative framework of media business objectives in relation to the Agenda 2030 goals, and finally propose a research agenda. In future versions of this paper we will complement this framework with case study data on Sustainable Management Practices at the largest Nordic media houses. This entails how managers understand and interpret the meaning of sustainability in the media context and media’s role for agenda 2030, but also how they operationalize and organize this in business practices.
This article is based on the assumption that nature inevitably plays a role in urban placemaking. Today, cities worldwide are engaged in place promotion in which nature is constructed as a commodity to consume. This article explores the enrollment of nature in tourist information with a specific analytical focus on the relationship between nature and culture. Guided by framing theory and citing the case of tourist information in Stockholm, the article empirically demonstrates how nature is enrolled in tourist information and turned into a commodity through three distinct but related frames that, in various ways, construct nature as ‘‘other’’: nature as the familiar other, nature as the exotic other, and pristine nature. The article concludes that the enrollment of nature in city marketing reproduces the modern nature-culture divide, which enables the commodification of nature and helps conceal the environmental consequences of increased urban density.