The Mediated Climate: Critical Media Literacy & the Climate Crisis

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This interdisciplinary course addresses the climate crisis as both a scientific challenge and a crisis of communication and culture. Team-taught by a climate scientist and a media historian, the course explores the underlying scientific research behind key topics of public debate, while also analyzing the media technologies, infrastructures, and cultures that have made it so difficult to act on an established scientific consensus. Our approach to climate media is not simply "science, illustrated", but rather a vigorous exploration of the climate crisis as a cultural knowledge, information, and policy problem. Students will work collaboratively to develop case studies that profile significant areas of public and scientific concern, including global climate modeling, global imbalances of political agency, public trust of science and scientists, the growth of AI data centers, and local and state case studies in environmental technologies.