COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE: DISCOURSES, MEDIATIONS AND PERCEPTIONS

Call for Papers Communicating Climate Change: Discourses, Mediations and Perceptions, the conference that will take place on 19-20 November 2007 at the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal).

Climate change is currently a prominent scientific, political, economic and civic issue with key implications for our common future(s). It mobilizes a variety of social actors and has figured highly on media agendas for around two decades.

The communication of climate change within and across the boundaries of science, politics and economics, and between expert and non-expert publics, poses a series of key questions for research. How is climate change framed and reframed by social actors such as scientists, policy-makers and environmental activists? How have the media represented climate change in the last two decades? What is the relation between media(ted) discourses and people's understanding of climate change? What can we learn from cross-national comparisons? To what extent are representations of climate change culturally-bound?

This conference aims to analyse the connections between discoursive and social representations of climate change. It will discuss the meanings of climate change in the discourses of various social actors, media(ted) discourses, and citizens' views on the issue.

The conference is associated with the project The Politics of Climate Change: Discourses and Representations, funded by Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia: http://www.cecs.uminho.pt/disclimate/Site-en1.htm.

Besides papers that focus specifically on the links between the discourses of social actors, media discourses and people's interpretations of climate change, the submission of abstracts on the following topics is welcome:

- Representations of scientific knowledge on climate change in various types of texts
- Reconstructions of climate change in political and business discourses
- Communication practices in climate change activism
- Media discourses on climate change (written, visual, electronic, multimedia)
- Web-based communication of climate change for non-expert publics
- Social representations of climate change
- Citizens' perceptions, attitudes and behaviours in relation to the issue.

Invited speakers (confirmed): Jacquie Burgess, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; Irene Lorenzoni, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; Hans Peter Peters, Jülich Research Center, Germany; Sheldon Ungar, University of Toronto, Canada.

Organization: Anabela Carvalho, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, University of Minho.

Abstracts of 250 words should be emailed to carvalho@ics.uminho.pt by September 5. A decision on the acceptance of abstracts will be communicated to authors a week later. A CD-ROM and possibly other publications will result from the conference.