Thursday 13th July
Communication for Sustainable Societies in the Anthropocene – the role of scholars and media industries
Annika Egan Sjölander (Umeå University, Sweden)
In this ending keynote I return to the overall theme of the conference, “Inhabiting the planet”, in order to engage in a dialogue about its challenging meaning for us as media and communication scholars today and in the future. Taking it seriously requires us to not only revise, but to profoundly re-work multiple boundaries and hierarchies in our own mundane knowledge production. This is not only a task for environmental communication scholars. The strong focus on social or societal dimensions is only one example. The habit of dividing humans from what we call nature is another, including the problematic hierarchy this distinction generally entails.
The role of media industries, a prime topic in our field, will also be discussed. They form parts of the commons in the Anthropocene and are therefore crucial when promoting much needed ‘just’ social change. At the same time, media industries themselves contribute in complex ways to the unprecedented environmental problems we face today, such as the climate crisis or biodiversity loss. The need for “greening the media” (Maxwell and Miller, 2012) has never been stronger.
Communication for sustainable societies in the Anthropocene, the title of this talk, points at the need for systematic and context-specific knowledge, both theoretical and empirical, about the role of media and communication when it comes to transformation(s) towards sustainability. Understanding “place” better, including global/local links and conflicts, is important. This will be exemplified with the case of emerging Climate Neutral Cities promoted by the EU Green Deal and the “green revolution” taking place in the Swedish North, all motivated by the climate crisis. Climate journalism and citizen dialogues in different places about this “green transition” are both key communication practices with democratic impact that ultimately influence societies’ ability to change.
Annika Egan Sjölander Bio
Annika Egan Sjölander is Professor and Chair in Media and Communication Studies at Umeå University, Sweden where she also leads the Umeå Transformation Research Initiative (UTRI), a cross-faculty network of researchers with an interest in transformation(s) towards sustainability. Egan Sjölander has taught and researched topics relating to science and the environment at several universities in Sweden (Umeå; Södertörn; Gävle) and elsewhere (Lancaster University, UK and UC Berkeley, USA). “Communication for Sustainable Societies in the Anthropocene” is the name of her research program that deals with the democratic role of media and communication when handling complex environmental problems such as nuclear waste, chemicals, climate change and water scarcity. Egan Sjölander was Chair of the Science and Environment Section in ECREA (2012-2018) and a founding member of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). In 2020 she edited The Local and the Digital in Environmental Communication together with colleagues from Australia, Belgium, India and Spain.
Moderators
- Valentyna Dymytrova, Lyon3 University
- Adrian Staii, Lyon3 University
