Narrating climate change on northern terms: Arctic Journalisms, Civic Spaces and Indigenous Publics

• In Event: Unsettling STS 2

Abstract

Mobilizing indigenous experiences with and narratives about climate change through various media can and do provide important insight for broad global publics of what it means to live with climate change both in the observable present and the predicted future. Representing and reporting on diverse indigenous peoples however can be extremely challenging given that media narratives tend to reproduce stereotypes, ignore Indigenous people and knowledge, and/or frame Indigenous people as proxies, victims, or heroes. This is particularly problematic in the Arctic, where Indigenous peoples, their non-human relatives, lands and waters have often been used to represent and demonstrate climate change as a stark and global-scale crisis already underway even whilst historical antecedents and chronic crises related to colonialism in the region remain unexamined and excluded from discussions about potential climate-related solutions. This paper draws on ethnographic research with Indigenous and non-Indigenous journalists across Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic territories as they navigate diverse Indigenous publics, and changes to journalistic practice related to digital media and civic space in an era of climate change, global audiences, and settler-colonialism. It argues that journalists are working at what Tallbear (2014) calls “the intersections of multiple systems of domination,” where reporting has stakes and consequences for configurations of power and social relations. It also seeks to contribute to “understandings of technosciences that account for colonial histories and postcolonial conditions” (Subramaniam et al, 2017), and asks how journalism might contribute to communal resilience and what Whyte (2014) terms “collective continuance.”

Author

• Candis Callison, Unversity of British Columbia