“Unite behind the Science!” Climate movements’ relations to science in narratives on environmental futures
On 9 February, we welcome Simone Rödder (Universität Hamburg) to SKAPE as part of our seminar series.
Following Greta Thunberg’s school strike in front of the Stockholm parliament in August 2018 and the October 2018 ‘declaration of rebellion’ by activists in the UK, 2019 saw several climate protest movements rise to public attention, including Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the US Sunrise Movement. What is striking about them is that they rather bluntly refer to science in their campaigns. In this talk, I will present an in-depth study of how the new climate protest movements relate to science. Employing a narrative analysis of different types of data (websites, press releases, media coverage), we study the movements’ understandings of “the science” as well as of science’s role in policy processes. We find that the movements’ in their initial phase adopt an IPCC worldview with very little “green ambivalence” and predominantly enact roles as science communicators.
Simone Rödder is an assistant professor of sociology, especially science studies, at Universität Hamburg. Her current research focuses on climate futures, climate movements and the medialisation and politicisation of expertise. She recently authored or co-authored “The ambivalent role of environmental NGOs in climate communication” (JCOM, 2020), “Historical, Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives on Earth System Modeling” (JAMES, 2020) and “Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change” (Open Book Publishers, 2020).
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This SKAPE seminar will take place online via Zoom (for link details, please email the Co-Directors – if you are already a member/associate member of SKAPE, you will receive a Zoom link two days before the start of the event).
Cover photo credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash.