Climate Media, Discourse, and Power

How does the American public think about and talk about climate change, and how are these discussions shaped by the interventions of powerful interest groups and political elites? In this course, we will consider how individuals’ understandings of climate change are deeply shaped by relations of power, from corporate strategies to delay meaningful action on climate change, to the norms and operations of media institutions, to dominant environmentalist discourses that fail to engage larger socioeconomic structures. While we will primarily discuss how public understanding has historically been constrained by the operation of power, we consider throughout possibilities for crafting climate narratives that resist these limitations to pursue transformative change. This course will focus primarily on climate politics in the United States, but we will also consider other national contexts and impacts on communities across the globe.