Must Environmental Communication be Explicitly ‘Critical’? A Consideration of Tensions Between Doubting and Emancipation

• In Event: Environmental Discourses: Rhetoric and Consequences

Abstract

The term ‘critical’ has been used in a variety of ways within recent writings in Environmental Communication: as a casual reference to a style of writing or as a signpost for writing that suggests an urgent need for action. This paper analyses the term ‘critical’, it’s intellectual lineage in the Frankfurt School and the tensions that underlie those thinkers’ definition and use of the term. This analysis shows that there is a key tension within critical work between an impulse to embrace emancipatory struggles and an impulse to reflect and doubt knowledge that has come before. I use these distinctions to discuss the way that Environmental Communication has been framed as a crisis discipline before suggesting the value in not trying to reduce these two impulses to either movement. Finally, I discuss how the concept of praxis has been used to work between these tensions when considering a concrete situation.

Author

• Murdoch Stephens, Massey University