ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter is the product of an invitation to write a focused and incisive contribution on interesting new perspectives and emphases for potential future trajectories in the field of environment and communication. The perspectives and emphases I will advance in this chapter, however, are not consistent with what is generally associated with ‘new’, an overvalued label that immerses twenty-first century public and academic discourse, and communication and media studies in specific (Murdock 2004). To the contrary, this chapter calls for reinvigorating classic sociological concerns and approaches in research on environment and communication, which have lost their glamour during the last decades (Hansen 2011). Instead of calling for the analysis of specific understudied or ‘new’ media outlets or communication practices (such as online representations, user generated content, persuasive communication, games, multimedia platforms, etc.), technologies (synthetic biology, nanobiotechnology, etc.) or environmental risks (fracking, fine dust particles, etc.), it calls for a reorientation of research aims and questions towards the social roles of media in liberal democratic societies and the relationship between media(ted) discourses, power and democratic politics. More specifically, an analytical framework will be put forward that allows conclusions to be drawn on the contribution of public discourse(s) to facilitating democratic debate and citizenship, and as a result, on how to communicate more effectively from the perspective of democratic politics. A defining characteristic of this analytical framework, i.e. the risk conflicts-perspective, is its politicization of research in the field of environment and communication: its respective conceptual, methodological and empirical choices are aimed at accommodating research designs to function as spaces for conflict and dissent to be expressed and registered. To this end, it is urgent to integrate literature from political theory on agonistic democracy and post-politics. I argue in this chapter that public and academic discourse on the environment is deeply characterized by the post-political zeitgeist that has swept through Western societies these last decades, with consensus and de-politicization as fundamental logics. In that respect, the existing work of an emergent Belgian school is broadened and deepened by applying its insights to the field of environment and communication. In the first section of this chapter, this post-political zeitgeist is characterized in general, before going deeper into existing work on the environment in specific. From this reading, three conditions are identified for developing a research agenda regarding the analysis of the contribution of public discourse to
democratic debate and citizenship. In the second section, the extent to which academic discourse1 in the field of environment and communication conforms to these conditions is investigated, by evaluating existing communication models and research literature on public discourse regarding climate change, respectively. In the third section, the risk conflicts-perspective is introduced, by focusing on its conceptual, methodological and empirical implications.
