Abstract
Climate change science has become an increasingly polarized site of controversy, where discussions on epistemological rigour are difficult to separate from debates on the impact that economic and political interests have on the production of evidence and the construction of knowledge. Little research has been conducted so far on the antagonistic discursive processes through which climate knowledge is being contested and traditional forms of expertise are being (de-)legitimized—whether by members of the scientific community or non-scientist actors. This corpus-based study contributes to previous scholarship on the climate science controversy in a number of respects. Unlike earlier studies based on the analysis of mainstream media articles, this paper interrogates a corpus of climate change blog posts published by scientists, journalists, researchers and lobbyists laying claim to core, contributory and interactional forms of expertise—as conceptualized within the third wave of science studies. Further, the corpus informing this study has been designed to reflect the complex and multivoiced nature of the climate knowledge production process. Drawn from five different blogs, the views represented are not confined to the two poles between which the entrenched dialectic of ‘alarmists’ versus ‘deniers’ is typically played out in the climate science debate. Following a systemic functional conceptualization of dialogic engagement as a means of positioning authorial voices vis-à-vis competing perspectives construed and referenced in a text, this paper reports on bloggers’ use of three lexical items (bias, dogma and peer review) to expose their reliance on (non-)epistemic values. Concordances and a range of visualization tools are used to gain systematic insights into the network of lexical choices that obtain around these items, and to gauge whether/how bloggers construct coherent authorial subjectivities in a bid to claim expert status and/or question the recognition of other players in the debate.
Highlights
The Genealogies of Knowledge Internet corpus is a collection of English texts published in a range of online news outlets and blogs written by journalists, academics and activists situated mainly on the radical right and left of the political spectrum
Among the outlets included in the latter group, this study focuses on climate change blogs, conceptualized here as increasingly politicized and polarized sites of controversy, where epistemological discussions on the quality of the science are difficult to separate from questions of scientific knowledge construction
Studies gauging the impact of media coverage on the public understanding of climate change (e.g. Feldman et al, 2015; Brevini and Lewis, 2018) have explored how political, corporate or consumerist discourses are contesting the weight of evidence about the causes and consequences of this phenomenon in the public arena; recent research has revealed the extent to which collective perceptions of climate change reflect the considerable ground that political actors have gained vis-à-vis their scientific counterparts in climate news coverage over the last three decades (Chinn et al, 2020)
Summary
The Genealogies of Knowledge Internet corpus is a collection of English texts published in a range of online news outlets and blogs written by journalists, academics and activists situated mainly on the radical right and left of the political spectrum. A growing body of research within the field of science communication has investigated how media shape public perceptions of the impact of anthropogenic climate change and facilitate the “transitioning from [public] awareness and concern to action” Studies gauging the impact of media coverage on the public understanding of climate change (e.g. Feldman et al, 2015; Brevini and Lewis, 2018) have explored how political, corporate or consumerist discourses are contesting the weight of evidence about the causes and consequences of this phenomenon in the public arena; recent research has revealed the extent to which collective perceptions of climate change reflect the considerable ground that political actors have gained vis-à-vis their scientific counterparts in climate news coverage over the last three decades (Chinn et al, 2020). As digital media outlets continue to increase the public’s exposure to a widening range of competing climate change discourses animated by an ever more varied array of participants and stakeholders, the reasons why individuals “choose news outlets where they expect to find culturally congruent arguments about climate change” that are consistent with their “cultural way of life” (Newman et al, 2018, p. 985) are becoming an object of increasing research interest
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