Events
Workshop 1: 'The Cultural Framing of Environmental Discourse'
Location: Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution
Date: 2nd-3rd December 2010
The first workshop explored the part played by norms
and values in key disciplines concerned with the environment, with the
concept of framing, and with the relevance of Frame Analysis (which
originated in Cognitive Psychology and Social Movement Sociology) for
the Humanities. It explored the extent to which the individual
disciplines identified and evaluated framings, shared research
questions, and sought to address different specific research questions
associated with framing processes, their implications and
consequences. In a public lecture entitled 'From Public Parks to Polar
Bears: Talking about the Environment and Making it Matter', guest
speaker Liz Warren drew on her experience in environmental consultancy.
Workshop 2: 'The Cultural Framing of Climate Change and Species Extinction'
Location: Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution
Date: 28th February-1st March 2011
The second workshop opened with a
joint public lecture and debate between Mike Hulme (Professor of Climate
Science and author of Why We Disagree about Climate Change)
and Adeline Johns-Putra (an expert on the literature of climate change).
Professor Ursula Heise (Stanford) was among those who contributed
papers on issues of literary and visual representation, and framing in
the media and civil society organisations.
Workshop 3: 'Reframing Disaster - Normalising
Catastrophe'
Location: Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution
Date: 16th-17th June 2011
The final workshop was concerned with perceptions of risk, the normalising of
floods and extreme weather, and attitudes towards the artificial. A
creative writing session led by author Clare George was included in the
first day. Network members also addressed the question of practical
applications of findings and discussed possibilities for developing a
larger interdisciplinary research project.
Achievements
The network brought together representatives of different disciplines working on environmental discourse and environmental communication in the UK, Europe and America. It has established the ability of framing to serve as a conceptual focus for comparative analysis of the differing (and shifting) understandings of environmental change across a range of discourses, and to throw light on the ways in which today's environmental challenges are communicated by social actors such as governments, opposition parties, industry and environmental pressure groups, the media, writers and artists. There has been practitioner participation by people working in tv, film, environment consultancy and creative writing, and the local public has been 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 have been addressed in papers such as Ursula Heise's 'Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction'. Heise places the narrative that usually accompanies scientific accounts of biodiversity loss in relation to the long tradition of environmentalist stories about the decline of nature, and demonstrates how elegiac and tragic story templates have turned accounts of the decline of a particular species into tools for a broader critique of modernization processes.
Network members plan to publish materials from the workshop in book or journal form.
Award details
Duration: July 2010 - October 2011
Principal Investigator:
Professor Axel Goodbody
Higher Education Institution:
Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath
Co-Investigators:
- Dr Ingolfur Blühdorn, University of Bath
- Dr Greg Garrard, Bath Spa University
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