Planetdeath Disease: The Anthropocene in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Disco Elysium

The more the global north has learned about the existential threat of climate change, the faster it has emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change, Lee Zimmerman thinks about why this is by examining how "climate change" has been discursively constructed, tracing how the ways we talk and write about climate change have worked to normalize a generalized, bipartisan denialism more profound than that of the overt "denialists." Suggesting that we understand that normalized denial as a form of cultural trauma, the book explores how the dominant ways of figuring knowledge about global warming disarticulate that knowledge from the trauma those figurations both represent and reproduce, and by which they remain inhabited and haunted. Its early chapters consider that process in representations of climate change across a range of disciplines and throughout the public sphere, including Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Barack Obama's speeches and climate plans, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. Later chapters focus on how literary representations especially, for the most part, participate in such disarticulations, and on how, in grappling with the representational difficulties at the climate crisis's heart, some works of fiction—among them Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker—work against that normalized rhetorical violence. The book closes with a meditation centered on the dream of the burning child Freud sketches in The Interpretation of Dreams. Highlighting the existential stakes of the ways we think and write about the climate, Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change aims to offer an unfamiliar place from which to engage the astonishing quiescence of our ecocidal present. This book will be essential reading for academics and students of psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, trauma studies, literature, and environmental studies, as well as activists and others drawn to thinking about the climate crisis.

This paper clarifies the competing discourses of sustainability and climate change and examines the manifestation of these discourses in local government planning. Despite the increasingly significant role of sustainability and climate change response in urban governance, it is unclear whether local governments are constructing different discourses that may result in conflicting approaches to policy-making. Using a governmentality approach, this paper dissects the contents of 15 Canadian local governments’ sustainability plans. The findings show that there are synergies and tensions between discourses of sustainability and climate change. Both share discursive space and shape local governance rationalities, though climate change response logics are not necessarily highlighted even where the action could result in greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. In some cases, existing GHG intensive practices are being rebranded as ‘sustainable’. This suggests a tension between discourses of sustainability and climate change that may complicate attempts to address climate change through local sustainability planning.

The purpose of the article, which is a comparative study, is to explore climate change discourses in South African and Norwegian geography textbooks by addressing the following questions: What policy discourses of climate change can be identified in the textbooks? How is the climate change content of geography textbooks influenced by predominant discourses in society? The authors assert that problems and solutions to climate change in textbooks are influenced by dominant discourses of climate change in society. Despite expecting to find a strong emphasis on ecological modernization and a win-win discourse in the Norwegian context, and perhaps a stronger focus on civic environmentalism and global injustice in the South African context, their findings reflected that for both countries, textbooks predominantly leaned towards belief in international agreements and green governmentality. Some emphasis was placed on ecological modernization, particularly in South Africa, while civic environmentalism and global injustice perspectives were marginal and lacked context. The overlapping nature of perspectives identified in the textbooks also demonstrated the complexity of identifying problems and solutions connected to climate change. The authors conclude that political ecology can offer a consistent didactical framework to examine the diversity of interests, perspectives and ‘stories’ about climate change at different scales.

Purpose – Adaptation to climate change requires that the population at risk and decision makers in various sectors become aware of the possible detrimental impacts in order to take whatever action is needed, especially in highly vulnerable countries and regions. In order to assess the climate change and impact awareness in a particularly vulnerable area – the Indian city Hyderabad, located within a semiarid region – we wanted to learn more about the local climate discourse, in particular the daily newspaper coverage of climate change and weather extremes.Methodology/approach – After having looked at the Indian climate change discourse (CCD) in general, based on literature review, we were studying the local public CCD, based on the in-depth analysis of two English language daily newspapers, and three Telugu (the dominant local language) daily newspapers, covering the period of 2008–2009. This qualitative and quantitative analysis was completed by two expert interviews with local journalists.Findings – We find that the more recent Indian CCD has shifted if compared to the dominant argumentation pattern of the period before, as reported in other analyses. While the former discourse was characterized by the scheme “the poor/developing countries suffer from anthropogenic climate change caused by the industrialized countries,” the recent Indian CCD has become more differentiated, taking into account both impacts elsewhere, and, most notably, conceding a (limited) responsibility of countries like India. On a local level, while reports on weather extremes are very common, we find that local newspapers of Hyderabad do not provide a link between these extreme events and (global) climate change.Research limitations – Our discourse analysis could only cover a short time period of a local CCD, leaving open the questions of (a) its further development, and (b) how things might stand in other places in India. Furthermore it would be necessary to complement our study by analyses of the impact of mass media reporting on people's attitudes and behavior.Originality/value of paper – Given the importance of public participation in adaptation measures, it is crucial to know if and how the wider public and the majority of the nonexpert public administration (which needs to be involved) understands the causes, potential impacts, and possible adaptive action in the face of climate change. This chapter provides a necessary (though not sufficient) element for that assessment. The findings can help to identify weaknesses, and thus to give hints how to improve the adaptive capacity in places like Hyderabad (India).

Transboundary water resources management in the Equatorial Nile Basin (EQNB) is a politically contested issue. There is a growing body of literature examining water-related discourses which identifies the ability of powerful actors and institutions to influence policy. Concern about the effects of future climate change has featured strongly in research on the Nile River for several decades. It is therefore timely to consider whether and how these concerns are reflected in regional policy documents and policy discourse. This study analyzes discourse framings of water resources management and climate change in policy documents (27, published between 2001 and 2013) and as elicited in interviews (38) with water managers in the EQNB. Three main discursive framings are identified which are present in the discourses on both subjects: a problem-oriented environmental risk frame and two solution-oriented frames, on governance and infrastructure development. Climate change discourse only emerges as a common topic around 2007. The framings found in the water resources management discourse and the climate change discourse are almost identical, suggesting that discursive framings were adopted from the former for use in the latter. We infer that the climate change discourse may have offered a less politically sensitive route to circumvent political sensitivities around water allocation and distribution between riparian countries in the EQNB. However, the climate change discourse does not offer a lasting solution to the more fundamental political dispute over water allocation. Moreover, in cases where the climate change discourse is subsumed within a water resources management discourse, there are dangers that it will not fully address the needs of effective adaptation.

The disproportional impacts of climate change on rural women are undisputable. Climate change impacts that manifest through droughts, heat waves, floods, scarcity of water and depletion of the natural resource base are becoming more precarious in the lives and livelihoods of rural women. This study aims to delineate factors hampering the participation of rural women in the climate change discourse in the Vhembe District, Limpopo, South Africa. The study adopted the qualitative methodology guided by a multi-case study design. A sample of 24 participants was selected through multistage sampling techniques. Rural women and social workers participated in the study. The data were collected using focus group discussions and semi-structured individual interviews and were analysed thematically. The study established that rural women in the Vhembe District are not participating in climate change decision-making processes, especially when it comes to community level politics where climate change-related decisions are made. Furthermore, the pervasive patriarchal dominance in the district discriminates against women and prevents them from acquiring land and property rights as well as adequate information about climate change adaptation and mitigation. The low social status of women is reducing their efforts to participate in the climate change discourse despite their perennial vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. These challenges faced by rural women in the climate change discourse are a cause for concern for the social work profession which is premised on enhancing human well-being.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aims to present scientific material to policymakers and a huge audience with different educational backgrounds so that they may respond to the growing man-induced Climate Change (CC). IPCC releases Assessment Reports, Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) and scientific assessments to identify the latest knowledge about CC. World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19 to be an international pandemic. WHO, accordingly, produces Situation Reports (SRs) about the COVID-19 epidemiological data. Being scientific documents about major two global issues, SPM and SRs are linguistically investigated. To render a comprehensive analysis of SPM and SRs discourses, macro- and micro-features of texts are considered. The analytical framework is bidimensional. Macro-textual features are inspired by the contributions of Van Dijk (1977, 1980); Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983); Kintsch and Van Dijk (1987) and Hamburger (1981). The analytical micro-level framework is founded on ScaPoLine polyphonists’ contributions: Nølke, Fløttum and Norén (2004). Findings illustrate SPM-SR differences at the macro- and micro-level. The study detects newly-used polyphonic items. It is concluded that CC and COVID-19 scientific discourses are polyphony-dependent, but multi-voicedness is a dominant feature in CC discourse.

Purpose This paper describes the different ways in which people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea are talking about climate change. It demonstrates that people locate themselves in this process of change in terms of food production and exchange, and that some of the changes being witnessed are also related to the impacts of a growing cash economy on social relations. Methodology/approach This ethnography involved 12 months fieldwork including participant observation and interviews. Research limitations/implications This is a qualitative study that recognises the perspective of local people for understanding culturally mediated experiences of climate change. However, data regarding rainfall and temperatures over time would be a useful addition for thinking about the extent to which the climate has in fact changed in recent years. Practical implications The implications of this paper are that the predictions made in 1990 about increases in production as a result of climate change are apparently coming true, with benefits for some food and coffee producers. But that there are complex social processes occurring at the same time as climate change that mean people’s ability to adapt is dependent on other social conditions. Maintaining ecologically sustainable methods of production and local cultural practices may enable more resilience to the impacts of climate change. Originality/value The experiences of people living in the Eastern Highlands and the ways in which people use the discourse of climate change are yet to be acknowledged in policy circles or socio-cultural anthropology literature. This paper presents a partial account of how people in Papua New Guinea are experiencing and talking about change.

Since the Syrian crisis and the so-called “Arab Spring”, new discourses have been created, sparking the discursive water governance debates around water scarcity and hydropolitics. In Lebanon and Jordan—where most water resources are transboundary, and where most Syrian refugees have flown in—new discourses of climate change and especially of Syrian refugees as exacerbating water scarcity are emerging, shaping water governance debates. The aim of this paper is to engage in comparative discourse analysis about narratives of water crises and refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. This study is novel because of the focus on the new discourse of refugees in relation to water governance debates in both Lebanon and Jordan. This paper finds that in both countries the new discourses of refugees do not replace previous and existing discourses of water crisis and scarcity, but rather they build on and reinforce them. This paper finds that the impact these discourses had on the governance debates is that in Lebanon the resources mobilized focused on humanitarian interventions, while Jordan focused on development projects to strengthen the resilience of its water infrastructure and its overall water governance system.

This piece of research explores language use in a sample of unprecedentedly studied discourse which is that of climate change communication by influential Spanish politicians via Twitter. For that purpose, we created a specialized corpus composed of tweets tackling climate change that were posted by influential Spanish politicians during the past decade. Our aim was to reveal prominent linguistic patterns that are susceptible of conveying a specific worldview (i.e.: the wording of reality) of climate change to Twitter users. Our analysis started with keywords analysis in order to gather quantitative data about the lexical choices deployed in our corpus, then by means of qualitative analysis based on semantic classification of keywords and the examination of their concordances we were able to point out distinctive features of our corpus’ discourse. Our results have revealed the prevalence of specific linguistic patterns, metaphors and frames that contribute to create a narrative of climate change as a villain and the human race, specifically political leaders, as the saviour.

This article theorises the notion of environmental citizenship in the context of climate change and migration discourse. The central claim of the article is that postcolonial theory is inadequate for fully coming to terms with the way in which the figure of the climate change migrant works as an oppositional referent to the environmental citizen. This is because postcolonial theory tends to trace how the colonial past animates the present, whereas climate change and migration discourse is written almost exclusively in the future-conditional tense. The resulting analysis focuses on the consequences the future-conditionality of climate change and migration discourse has for conceptualising environmental citizenship in the context of climate change. One such consequence is that the category ‘race’ must be reconceptualised as a future potential of bodies rather than the effect of historical signification.

Literature on the digital games industry and gaming history has for the most part focused on the global production centres of North America, Western Europe, Japan, and, lately, China. However, in recent years, a call to research the diverse and less dominant national contexts within which digital games are produced has been addressed. In this article, we shed light on early digital game development in Greece, covering the years between 1982 and 2002. This particular region has been highly neglected by both domestic and international researchers. We approach Greek digital game development from both historical and cultural perspectives, through an investigation of how local game developers interact with a wide range of contextual facets in a complex interrelation between global and national conditions. This article argues that, in order to highlight the characteristics of early national game production cultures and digital games design, one must examine them as well under the broader cultural production ecosystem, along with the economic and institutional contexts and transformations within which digital game production takes shape.

Discourses about young people are interacting with climate change discourses in ways that often marginalize the young in social responses to climate change. The resulting stories about young people in a changing climate build upon long‐standing representations of youthhood in late modern societies as a liminal, ill‐defined state between childhood and adulthood. The social and behavioral sciences have both helped produce these stories and critically examined their origins, characteristics, and effects. This article offers a novel critical review of ideas about young people in climate change research across a wide variety of disciplines and fields, including geography, psychology, sociology, education, political studies, health studies, media studies, legal studies, and youth studies. We employ Hajer's account of discursive storylines to identify seven ways in which young people are storied in climate discourses. While distinct, stories of young people as innocent, vulnerable, heroic, alarmist, inheriting, apathetic or narcissistic overlap, and interact. This variety of storylines reflects the mutable category of young people and the deliberate ambiguity with which it is often deployed. We use this typology in three ways to advance the interests of young people in climate change discourses. First, we show how these discourses are indebted to while also changing understandings of young people in late modern societies. Second, we consider the potential impacts of these stories on young lives and on responses to climate change. Third, we identify prospects for new stories to emerge as young voices become increasingly important in urgent social discussions of climate change.This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change

The issue of climate change is reflective of a cornucopia of interconnected variables, which involve political, societal, as well as ethical and moral considerations associated with empathy, responsibility, sustainability, and solidarity (Sadler-Smith & Akstinaite 2022). Due to these reasons, research in climate change discourse has gained currency in the present-day linguistic and mass media studies. One of the means of exploring how corporate and political actors view the issue of global climate change involves framing, which is copiously applied in linguistic, mass media, and discourse-related research directions (Gillings & Dayrell 2024; Schlichting 2013). To-date, however, little is known about how climate change discourse is framed by the current British monarch King Charles III. This contribution presents a qualitative study that explores the way climate change discourse is framed by King Charles III. The study involves a corpus of speeches on the topic of climate change delivered by King Charles III from 2005 to 2023. The corpus was analysed qualitatively in line with the framing methodology developed by Entman (1993, 2004, 2007). The analysis revealed that climate change was framed as A 2 Degree World, Deforestation, Responsibility, Risk, Sustainability, Threat, and Urgency. The findings and their discussion are further described in the article.

While climate change discourse on Western platforms like Twitter often reveals signs of polarization and misinformation, discussions on Chinese social media remain less explored. Building on the theoretical framework of the green public sphere, this study aims to explore the features of the content (topics and veracity), the characteristics of engaged users (regular users and social bots), and the communication strategies adopted by engaged users in climate change discussions on Chinese social media. We employed machine learning methods to analyze 452,167 climate change-related posts generated by 311,214 users from 2010 to 2020 on Weibo, finding that climate change discourse concentrated on environmental and health impacts and action advocacy, and misinformation was not prevalent. Regarding the composition of engaged users, only a small proportion were social bots which concentrated on action advocacy and politics and governance, rather than skeptical and denialist discourses. In terms of communication strategies, we found that social bots on Weibo were more likely to forward a post or mention another user than regular users. This study expands our understanding of climate change discourse and the green public sphere on social media and provides insights into leveraging social bots in climate change communication in an AI-powered society.