Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal

Call for Papers

Climate Change Discourse: Re-mediation and Re-contextualisation in News and Social Media
Editors Katherine E. Russo (university of Naples L'Orientale; kerusso@unior.it) and Cinzia Bevitori (University of Bologna; cinzia.bevitori@unibo.it)

Numerous scholars have pointed out that citizens’ awareness, attitudes and actions towards climate change are shaped by mediated information (Bevitori, 2011, 2014; Boycoff and Boycoff, 2004; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Russo 2018; Russo and Wodak 2017). News media play an important role in the popularization of climate science and scientific evaluations of climate-related risks. In order to make risk decisions, citizens seek information, which is increasingly circulated through online news media, and later re-mediated in social media, such as facebook and twitter, or face-to-face conversations. Yet, when climate-change discourse is re-mediated, its recontextualisation redefines the meaning assigned to climate change terminology and discourse due to the influence of news values such as negativity, personalization, impact, superlativeness, novelty, and expectation (Bednarek 2006, 2008). For instance, certain events, such as environmental disasters or announcements by prominent scientist or politicians, fulfil news values more than others (Bell, 1991; Fowler, 1991; van Dijk, 1988). Yet, as Bednarek and Caple note (2012, p. 44; 2017, p. 79), news values and newsworthiness should be conceptualized in terms of how events or propositions are construed through discourse. In their opinion, “newsworthiness is not inherent in events but established through language and image” (Bednarek and Caple, 2012, pp. 41). Indeed, the discourse of climate change has changed over time in order to avoid editorial fatigue and satisfy news values (Boycoff and Boycoff, 2007; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Bevitori, 2011).

We invite critical, theoretical and discourse-analytical articles investigating different genres operating in the context of “old and new” media.

Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

-Critical Discourse Analysis Studies

-Integrated Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies Approaches

-Integrated Corpus Linguistics and Appraisal Linguistics Approaches

- Media and Communication Studies

- Comparative Studies

- Rhetorics and Stylistics Studies

Deadline for abstracts:

Please send 200/250 words abstracts directly to co-editors and CC anglistica@unior.it by 15 December 2022.

Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2022

Deadline for completed articles: 30 March 2022

References:

Bednarek, M. Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London and New York: Continuum, 2006.
Bednarek, M. Emotion Talk across Corpora. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Bednarek, M. and H. Caple. News Discourse. London: Continuum, 2012.
Bednarek, M. and H. Caple. The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Bell, A. The Languages of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Bevitori, C. “’Imagine, If You Will.’ Reader Positioning on Climate Change in US Op-Ed Articles”. In G. Di Martino, L. Lombardo, and S. Nuccorini (Eds), Challenges for the 21^st Century: Dilemmas, Ambiguities, Directions, Roma: Edizioni Q, 2011. pp. 367-76.
Bevitori, C. “Values, Assumptions and Beliefs in British Newspaper Editorial Coverage of Climate Change”. In C. Hart and P. Cap (Eds), Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. pp. 603-626.
Boycoff, M., and J. Boycoff. “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S Prestige Press”. Global Environmental Change. 2004.14 (2): 125-126.
Carvalho, A. and J. Burgess. “Cultural Circuits of Climate Change in U.K. Broadsheeet Newspapers”, 1985-2005. Risk Analysis. 2005. 25 (6): 1457-1469.
Fowler, Roger. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
Russo, Katherine E., 2018. The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: The Case of Climate Change and Migration, ESI, Napoli, 2018.
Russo Katherine E. and Ruth Wodak, eds., Special Issue “The Representation of ‘Exceptional Migrants’ in Media Discourse: The Case of Climate-induced Migration”, Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21.2 (2017).
Van Dijk, Teun A. News as Discourse. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988.