Negotiating Climate Change in Public Discourse: Insights from Critical Discourse Studies

This book critically analyses how diverse Parties and non-Party stakeholders (such as subnational governments, cities, states, foundations, NGOs, civil society, multilateral organizations, and the private sector) promote climate actions through linguistic and visual symbols across multiple platforms, unveiling the underlying ideologies within these discourses.

Chapters in this volume employ methods from critical discourse studies (CDS) to explore the interplay between the material realities of climate change and the discursive communication among various Parties and non-Party stakeholders through multimodal approaches across multiple platforms. They draw on discourses such as the UN speeches, UN documents, EU green deal policy, official documents submitted by African countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and news reports in China and Australia. The research presented utilizes and revisits diverse social and linguistic concepts to better inform the use of linguistic and/or visual symbols in different types of public discourse. This timely volume takes the field a step further by showing the importance of carrying out more international research to expand our knowledge of the global, regional, and local discourse and ideologies that shape what we come to know and understand as climate change and how it is to be addressed.

It will bring significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into the relations between language use, discursive practice, and social practice. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

Dr. Guofeng Wang is Professor at Shanghai Normal University. Her research interests include discourse studies and media studies, particularly the interplay between discourse, media and society.

Dr. Changpeng Huan is Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research focuses on corpus- or Python-informed discourse studies in both traditional and new media.