{"title":"Changing discourses of climate change: building social-ecological resilience cross-culturally","authors":"A. Plastina","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0078","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Social-ecological resilience (SER) is setting a new trend of thinking about environmental issues since it considers climate unpredictability as the norm in the Anthropocene and climate disturbance as offering opportunities for change. This paper argues that SER can be conceptualized as a function of narrative text and talk in the recent practice of online environmental activism. Based on a case study, the investigation explores a TED talk by the US environmentalist, Al Gore, and a web-based text by the Indian activist, Vandana Shiva, seeking how meanings of climate change enhance resilience building. A mixed-method research design is used to perform a discursive frame analysis on the sample discourses, guided by key resilience-building principles, and framed by the methods of critical discourse and frame analyses. The twofold aim is to analyse how micro-linguistic features mediate social-ecological memory and novelty as key SER drivers, and how macro-discursive frames are selected to shape meanings cross-culturally. Based on these findings, the comparative analysis at the socio-discursive level highlights how SER ideologies underpinning these discourses particularly diverge in the context of the Global North/Global South divide. Overall, the study findings shed light on the multiple meanings of SER shaping more constructive responses to climate change.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0078","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
Abstract Social-ecological resilience (SER) is setting a new trend of thinking about environmental issues since it considers climate unpredictability as the norm in the Anthropocene and climate disturbance as offering opportunities for change. This paper argues that SER can be conceptualized as a function of narrative text and talk in the recent practice of online environmental activism. Based on a case study, the investigation explores a TED talk by the US environmentalist, Al Gore, and a web-based text by the Indian activist, Vandana Shiva, seeking how meanings of climate change enhance resilience building. A mixed-method research design is used to perform a discursive frame analysis on the sample discourses, guided by key resilience-building principles, and framed by the methods of critical discourse and frame analyses. The twofold aim is to analyse how micro-linguistic features mediate social-ecological memory and novelty as key SER drivers, and how macro-discursive frames are selected to shape meanings cross-culturally. Based on these findings, the comparative analysis at the socio-discursive level highlights how SER ideologies underpinning these discourses particularly diverge in the context of the Global North/Global South divide. Overall, the study findings shed light on the multiple meanings of SER shaping more constructive responses to climate change.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.