Publications including this keyword are listed below.
In December 2021, Netflix released a comedy feature film, ‘Don't Look Up’. The film follows two scientists who discover an extinction-level comet heading for Earth, which they then attempt to warn humanity about. The makers of the film have publicly stated that the film is meant as a satirical metaphor for the response to the climate emergency. The film presents representations of science, scientists, and science communication. In this set of commentaries, experts have been selected to explore these representations and the lessons the film presents for using satire in science communication.
‘Don't look up’ represents the news media as harmful to the public understanding of science. The news media turns honest scientists into corrupted and compromised media personalities. Its dynamics and demands make it unable to inform the public that a planet-killing comet, the film's allegory for climate change, is an existential threat. This commentary argues that these representations devalue the power of celebrity scientists to communicate science, ignore how journalists have placed climate change and ideas of climate catastrophe on the public agenda, and imply there is an idealised type of science communication — the deficit model — that journalists have corroded.
‘Don't Look Up’ makes no direct reference to climate change, yet functions as a climate communication film, satirising political and societal responses to the scientific evidence of climate change and to the lack of concerted global climate action. As a popular cultural story of climate inaction, ‘Don't Look Up’ importantly critiques existing values of late-capitalism in the form of speculative techno-fixes, extractive capitalism and celebrity commodity culture. Yet as a mainstream Hollywood film, it privileges global north perspectives. More diverse stories that go beyond apocalyptic imageries are required to more clearly centre climate justice within popular cultural imaginaries.
The 5th Luosuo River Science Education Forum was held online from December 7 to 8, 2021, with the theme “Education for Ecological Civilization: Post-2020 Biodiversity Education and Communication”. The Forum assembled stakeholders to discuss four aspects of the topic: biodiversity conservation with Chinese characteristics, biodiversity education theory, biodiversity education practice, and biodiversity communication innovation, to promote “global vision and local action” in mainstreaming biodiversity conservation.
The language of science communication has moved from deficit to dialogue and talk of a ‘new social contract’ with the public ‘invited to participate’. This paper outlines a practitioner path that begins with storytelling and moves to a more participatory mode of practice of science communication for adaptation to climate change at the community scale. I outline personal practitioner reflections, specifically the need to consider issues of power, place, pain and the need to challenge assumptions. I propose the need to consider context, many forms of local knowledge and expertise, social learning, plus the pain of historical, contemporary or projected loss.
In this practice insight, an art-based, participatory intervention (#finaltrashtination) is presented as higher education assignment in environmental and climate change communication. The project #finaltrashtination made dominant environmentally destructive ways of wasting visible and stimulated students to take responsibility, advocacy and authorship for transformation. Beyond the one-day eco-culture jam, the project engaged the wider public through conversations about a specific environmental problem. Thus, the project shows how conversational problematization and sensemaking around scientific facts can be initiated by using eco-culture jams promoting very unsettling moments of reflection.
Despite the societal relevance of energy research, there is a distinct lack of citizen science initiatives in the field. This paper reports the experience of a participatory and innovative strategy to develop a citizen science initiative for solar energy research. A number of stakeholders participated in the definition and implementation of the initiative, and tools such as surveys and a hackathon were employed. The process described aims to provide a blueprint for transforming the relationship between citizens and research into societal challenges. Here we describe the collaborative process and analyse the main opportunities, limitations and future perspectives.
This essay examines a highly popular comic series published in Spain between 1969 and 1970 which focused on Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente (1928–1980), a prominent and influential naturalist and media icon, as main character. These comics constitute a remarkably illustrative example of the use of popular media in processes of construction of natural history knowledge. Situated in the complex final years of Franco's regime, they allow us to probe the combined role of science, media, and celebrity in the construction of a visual environmental culture through storytelling strategies designed to engage young audiences in naturalist-like practices.
While research shows different links between activism and science, little is known about activists engaging in science communication online. Demanding that decision-makers should “listen to the scientists”, the climate movements Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) emphasize the role of scientific knowledge in democratic decision-making. Exploring the two movements' hyperlinking practices reveals a difference in the extent and selection of hyperlinks on their websites, pointing to influencer-based communication and focus on popularization of science by FFF and expert-based communication leaning on academic publications by XR, with both movements acting as amplifiers of existing science communication efforts.
While most Americans believes in climate change, to elicit action, communicators should use strategies to convey risks. One strategy is to cognitively engage individuals by eliciting curiosity. Previous studies have shown that individuals with higher science curiosity are more likely to perceive the risk of climate change. This study uses scientists’ act of sharing personal anecdotes to elicit curiosity and examines the effect of scientist’s traits on risk perception. Results show that anecdotes do not affect any of the variables. However, there is a positive relationship between curiosity and risk perception, and between trust in scientists and risk perception.