Conceptualisation of Sustainability

Nikola Dobrić,Franzisca Weder

doi:10.23963/cnp.2021.6.2.3

Nikola Dobrić, Franzisca Weder

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.23963/cnp.2021.6.2.3

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Abstract

Metaphors are language phenomena commonly used as tools of persuasion, as evident in different kinds of public discourses, most notably in political addresses. They are particularly potent in this respect because they function on the principle of connecting the logical with the emotional. This persuasive role has also been attested in media reports, usually employed for the purposes of framing and the creation of a specific narrative. The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical and methodological account of metaphor choices related to sustainability and restoration, as issues related to climate change, made by the contemporary media and the perceptions formed by repetition and reinforcements of certain kinds of imagery present in their choice. An additional purpose is to understand which information sources, and possible instances of influence and leverage, could be of importance in terms of the media reporting on sustainability-related issues. Therefore, the paper offers novel conceptual and analytical guidelines for future research in the field of sustainability communication.

Highlights

Sustainability is at its core a narrative enterprise (Herrick and Pratt 2013), stimulating public discourses in many ways
If we focus on the idiomatic ‘chill out’, the attempt by this media outlet to ‘frame’ climate change as a segment of someone’s irrational behaviour becomes rather evident
While there is a long history of thinking about how people perceive their environment and how much this influences their knowledge and their awareness of problems, there are few and only limited studies dealing with sustainability communication, and even fewer dealing with meaning-making processes in relevant communicative contexts and specific countries or cultural settings

Summary

Introduction

Sustainability is at its core a narrative enterprise (Herrick and Pratt 2013), stimulating public discourses in many ways. We take stories and narratives as the foundation of meaning and sense making processes (van der Leeuw 2019, Weder et al 2019, Eisenstein 2013), and focus on metaphors at the core of the sustainability narratives, bending via scientific reasoning as one part of the sustainability story (Frank 2017) to consumer centred, emotive communication and empty “buzz-wording” (Krainer and Weder 2011) This is embedded in a narrative approach to sustainability as an ‘emergent quality’ in relation to the ecological crisis (Sahinidou 2016) and the wider story of climate change. Viewing the use of language in general and metaphors in particular for manipulating public perception and opinion via political discourse, where their role has long been recognised as crucial, as parallel to the way media present different issues, one is drawn away from cognitive linguistics towards the theoretical concepts of agenda setting and framing research, within the field of media studies. We can say that that government and official sources ‘organise’ (Weder 2012) and hereby influence the media agenda in health communication and, more importantly and by extent, the public perception of the issue at hand in a broader sense

Theoretical Background

Cognitive Linguistics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Understanding Nature by Studying Frames and Metaphors

A Research Methodology to Understand Sustainability

Discussion