Visualizing Climate Change: On the Role of the Visual in National Geographic’s Climate Change Discourse.

• In Event: Visual (In)Sensibilities II

Abstract

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges for humanity in the 21st century. The visual plays an important role in communicating this highly controversial issue, since it helps to localize and personalize this remote and global issue. Yet, images are also open for multiple interpretations.
Building on critical multimodal discourse analysis, I will investigate the role of the visual within the climate change discourse of the popular science magazine National Geographic. I thereby focus on how different and shifting discursive tropes have been used to visualize (un-)certainty and to (de-)naturalize climate change by drawing on different conceptualizations and delineations of nature and society. I will thus historically trace the work taken to establish climate change as an unquestioned ‘fact’ within National Geographic and highlight the role of the visual to create evidence for it.
Popular science magazines hold an important position in science communication. Located between specialized scientific journals and the mass media, they select, synthesize and recontextualize scientific knowledge, thereby forming a distinct literary genre through which scientific knowledge is communicated to a highly specialized audience. Within this form and format of science communication, the visual plays an important but often neglected role. This paper thus highlights the specificities of (visual) climate change communication within the specific format of a popular science magazine.

Author

• Dorothea Born, University of Vienna