Communicating the environment: Guest editors’ introduction

Abstract

The articles gathered together in this special issue were submitted in response to a call for manuscripts, issued in 2009, on ‘Communicating the environment’. While the recent decade has seen the rise to dominance of ‘climate change’ as a focus for media, public and political environmental concern, as well as for science/social science research on the environment, the call for papers deliberately aimed more broadly at attracting contributions from the wider field of social science, media, communication and cultural studies research on environmental communication. The articles brought together here thus represent a rich and exciting range of research foci and, equally important in our view, of theoretical frameworks and research approaches to the study of environmental mediation and communication. Comprising a range of different national and media foci, they offer analyses of a diverse range of media forms including film/animation, television, promotional videos, newspapers and magazines, and with contributions by scholars from New Zealand, Canada, the US, the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. The environmental issues examined range from climate change, nuclear power and agricultural biotechnology, to media portrayals of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’. Not surprisingly, given the rise of ‘framing analysis’ in the last two decades, several of the articles draw on, deploy and advance ‘framing analysis’, while often combining the insights from theories of ‘framing’ with content analysis and discourse analytical approaches. In our view, a particular strength of this special issue is