Framing Climate Change: Place and Justice

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Everyday Environmentalism: Critical Perspectives 2

Abstract

Climate change is impacting coastal Southeast Florida, and as a result, climate action groups have mobilized to educate the public, advocate for climate justice, and build resiliency locally. Within this context, the authors examined how climate change awareness influenced climate actions. Specifically, we asked how a climate justice non-profit framed climate change in their community-based educational workshops, how attendees understood or interpreted climate change, and how the workshops influenced attendee behavior. Data were collected from participant observations of an 11-week, community-based workshop on climate change and subsequent semi-structured interviews with attendees. We found that the climate educators framed climate change in terms of place and justice, while advancing collective action as a narrative to inform and mobilize residents. From the workshops, participants interpreted climate change to be an issue locally for both place and justice, but expressed separate identities from the injustice narrative. Despite an educational effort geared toward structural understandings on the political and economic underpinnings of climate change, the majority of students adopted micro-level behavioral actions in the home, and less than half of participants engaged in endeavors to build resiliency in their communities. Therefore, we found that participants’ perceptions toward climate injustice and their personal identities within a frame alignment process had implications on the types of climate actions that they engaged in. In other words, participants who did not feel impacted by climate injustice were less engaged in collective action and, instead, focused on individual behavioral and household climate actions.

Author

• Casey Jo Mullen, University of Utah