Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape (Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics)

This open access volume is a call for ecological awareness and action through communication. It offers perspectives on how we, as humans, posit ourselves in relation to, and as part of, the environment in both verbal and non-verbal discourse. The contributions investigate a variety of situated communicative practices and how they instantiate and potentially influence our actions. Through the frameworks of ecolinguistics, multimodal studies and ecoliteracy, the book discusses how the environmental crisis is communicated as an urgent global and local issue in a variety of media, texts and events. The contributions present a wide range of case studies (including news articles, institutional websites, artwork installations, promotional texts, signposting, social campaigns and other), and they explore how communicative actions can help meet the challenges of ecologically-oriented change. The focus is on the impact that linguistic and multimodal communication can have on acting in, with and towards the environment seen as living ecosystems, or ‘lifescapes’. The chapters offer a reflection on the way we experience, endorse, reframe and resist value systems in ecological communication, and propose alternative and healthier perspectives to respect and preserve the common and nurturing lifescapes through awareness and action. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Maria Bortoluzzi is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Udine, Italy.

Arran Stibbe is a Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire. Arran has an academic background in both humanities and human ecology, and combines the two in his teaching and research into Education for Sustainability. He has published widely in the area of ecolinguistics and is currently a senior lecturer and University Teaching Fellow. He is also convenor of the Sustainability in Higher Education Developers group, a network of around 200 sustainability educators across the UK.

Elisabetta Zurru is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the University of Genoa, Italy.

Mariana Roccia is the Founder of M.R Language Services and an Independent Scholar.