ABSTRACT
The chapter surveys progress in the emerging field of visual environmental communication research, defined as research concerned with theorizing and empirically examining how visual imagery (news photographs, scientific/graphical representations, advertising, cartoons, etc.) communicates and constructs messages about the environment. Centered on the contribution that visuals make to the social, political and cultural construction of ‘the environment’, visual environmental communication research analytically requires a multi-modal approach, which situates analysis of the semiotic, discursive, rhetorical and narrative characteristics of visuals in relation to three major contexts (communicative, cultural and historical) and three main sites (production, content, consumption) of visual communication.
