Julie Doyle is a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Brighton, where she is Director of the Centre for Research in Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. Her research examines the ways in which media and culture shape our understandings of, and responses to, climate change. With a particular focus upon visual communication, Julie has worked collaboratively with visual artists and practitioners, and provided consultancy for environmental NGOs, government, and the sustainability communications sector on best practice for climate and environmental communication. She is Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities and has played a key role in the international professionalisation of environmental communication as an interdisciplinary academic field: as a member of the founding Board of Directors of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA); as co-founder and former Vice-Chair of the ‘Science and Environment Communication Section’ of ECREA; as Co-Judge of the IAMCR’s inaugural ‘Climate Communication Research Award’; and as a current serving member on the Steering Committee of MeCCSA’s ‘Climate Change, Environment and Sustainability Network’ (CCES). She is passionate about the importance of collaborative and creative research practice for creating more meaningful and effective climate communication and engagement. Phone: Tel: ++44 1273 642414 Address: School of Art, Design and Media College of Arts and Humanities University of Brighton Watts Building Lewes Road, Moulsecoomb Brighton BN2 4GJ UK
"Climate change has been a significant area of scientific concern since the late 1970s, but has o... more "Climate change has been a significant area of scientific concern since the late 1970s, but has only recently entered mainstream culture and politics. However, as media coverage of climate change increases in the twenty-first century, the gap between our understanding of climate change and climate action appears to widen.
In this timely book, Julie Doyle explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Mediating Climate Change identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. It offers ways forward by exploring how climate change can be made more meaningful through, for example, innovative forms of climate activism, the reframing of meat and dairy consumption, media engagement with climate events and science, and artistic experimentation.
Doyle argues that cultural discourses have problematically situated nature and the environment as objects externalised from humans and culture. Mediating Climate Change calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations, in order for us to be able to more fully imagine and address the challenges climate change poses for us all."
How is 'participation' ascribed meaning and practiced in science and environment communication? A... more How is 'participation' ascribed meaning and practiced in science and environment communication? And how are citizen voices articulated, invoked, heard, marginalized or silenced in those processes? Citizen Voices takes its starting point in the so-called dialogic or participatory turn in scientific and environmental governance in which practices claiming to be based on principles of participation, dialogue and citizen involvement have proliferated. The book goes beyond the buzzword of 'participation' in order to give empirically rich, theoretically informed and critical accounts of how citizen participation is understood and enacted in mass mediation and public engagement practices. A diverse series of studies across Europe and the US are presented, providing readers with empirical insights into the articulation of citizen voices in different national, cultural and institutional contexts. Building bridges across media and communication studies, science and technology studies, environmental studies and urban planning studies, Citizen Voices also offers a range of different theories and research methodologies which foreground the role of communication processes in scientific and environmental governance.
This article brings climate communication approaches to transformational climate learning by crit... more This article brings climate communication approaches to transformational climate learning by critically evaluating an experimental climate com-munication retreat that brought 20 young adults from across Europe together in Austria to co-create climate communications as a constitutive dimension of climate action. Structured around the transformational principles of interdisciplinarity, multidimensionality, collaborative project-based learning, reflexivity and action-oriented, the retreat spe-cifically focused upon the creative co-production, between peers, of climate communication as communicative meaning-making and action. The retreat experience transformed young people’s sociocultural under-standings of climate change, and climate communication as meaning-making and action, and increased their self and group efficacy. The key factors contributing to these transformations were: the forging of collective identity, peer-to-peer learning, emotional sharing, reflexive spaces, inspiring learning environment, interdisciplinary learning, multi-dimensional experiences, and collaborative project-based communica-tions. Situating co-created climate communication within transformational learning can help facilitate collective experiences beyond direct climate action participation, helping create education for social change.
Climate communication calls for new climate stories that move beyond apocalyptic imaginings. This... more Climate communication calls for new climate stories that move beyond apocalyptic imaginings. This article focuses on the role of young people in the collective reimagining of climate change through an interdisciplinary creative youth project that used speculative fiction and participatory play to enable a group of 14-to 15-year-olds in the United Kingdom to produce their own climate communications. Cocreated with a third-sector arts partner and evaluated through participant observation and questionnaires, the project found that creative and participatory approaches encouraged sociocultural and emotional engagements with climate change, increasing young people's feelings of efficacy. Yet, it also found that young people need careful support in understanding climate change as a multidimensional issue and in facilitating more positive and transformative climate-futures thinking. Interdisciplinary and creative climate communication education work thus needs to be prioritized to facilitate young people's collective and socially transformative engagements with climate change.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 2017
Since the mid-2000s, entertainment celebrities have played increasingly prominent roles in the cu... more Since the mid-2000s, entertainment celebrities have played increasingly prominent roles in the cultural politics of climate change, ranging from high-profile speeches at UN climate conferences, and social media interactions with their fans, to producing and appearing in documentaries about climate change that help give meaning to and communicate this issue to a wider audience. The role afforded to celebrities as climate change communicators is an outcome of a political environment increasingly influenced by public relations and attuned toward the media’s representation of political ideas, policies, and sentiments. Celebrities act as representatives of mass publics, operating within centers of elite political power. At the same time, celebrities represent the environmental concerns of their audiences; that is, they embody the sentiments of their audiences on the political stage. It is in this context that celebrities have gained their authority as political, social, and environmental “experts,” and the political performances of celebrities provide important ways to engage electorates and audiences with climate change action
More recently, celebrities offer novel engagements with climate change that move beyond scientific data and facilitate more emotional and visceral connections with climate change in the public’s everyday lives. Contemporary celebrities, thus, work to shape how audiences and publics ought to feel about climate change in efforts to get them to act or change their behaviors. These “after data” moments are seen very clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood. Yet, with celebrities acting as our emotional witnesses, they not only might bring climate change to greater public attention, but they expand their brand through neoliberalism’s penchant for the commoditization of everything including, as here, care and concern for the environment. As celebrities build up their own personal capital as eco-warriors, they create very real value for the “celebrity industrial complex” that lies behind their climate media interventions. Climate change activism is, through climate celebrities, rendered as spectacle, with celebrities acting as environmental and climate pedagogues framing for audiences the emotionalized problems and solutions to global environmental change. Consequently, celebrities politicize emotions in ways that that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and actions that responsibilize audiences and the public.
Veganism offers an important critique of unethical and unsustainable food production practices, y... more Veganism offers an important critique of unethical and unsustainable food production practices, yet vegans have been historically stigmatized in mainstream media. Given the recent prominence of celebrity vegans, this article asks, how might the cultural intermediary work of vegan celebrities make the ethical practice of veganism more accessible? And how do vegans' ethical concerns about the exploitative production and consumption of animals as food and by-products get reframed in the context of celebrity consumer culture? Bringing together philosophies of ethical veganism and eco-feminism with literature on ethical (food) consumption and celebrity culture, this article analyses the educational campaigning work on veganism by Hollywood actor, Alicia Silverstone and TV chat show host, Ellen DeGeneres. It finds that veganism is figured as a diet and lifestyle that foregrounds an ethics of care, compassion, kindness and emotion-about and for humans, animals and environment-consistent with ethical veganism. Yet these ethics are reworked through the commodity logic of celebrity culture to make it more marketable and thus consumable as a set of ideas and gendered lifestyle practices, where the individual choice is to be a healthy, happy and kind self. The tensions between ethical veganism as an intervention at the point of consumption within the production of exploitative and gendered human/animal/environmental relations, and the focus upon an individualised lifestyle politics through which celebrities maintain their commodity status, thus coalesce in the work of celebrity vegans.
Special Issue: ‘Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture’, Transformations, November 2007. , Nov 1, 2007
"Climate change has been a significant area of scientific concern since the late 1970s, but has o... more "Climate change has been a significant area of scientific concern since the late 1970s, but has only recently entered mainstream culture and politics. However, as media coverage of climate change increases in the twenty-first century, the gap between our understanding of climate change and climate action appears to widen.
In this timely book, Julie Doyle explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Mediating Climate Change identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. It offers ways forward by exploring how climate change can be made more meaningful through, for example, innovative forms of climate activism, the reframing of meat and dairy consumption, media engagement with climate events and science, and artistic experimentation.
Doyle argues that cultural discourses have problematically situated nature and the environment as objects externalised from humans and culture. Mediating Climate Change calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations, in order for us to be able to more fully imagine and address the challenges climate change poses for us all."
How is 'participation' ascribed meaning and practiced in science and environment communication? A... more How is 'participation' ascribed meaning and practiced in science and environment communication? And how are citizen voices articulated, invoked, heard, marginalized or silenced in those processes? Citizen Voices takes its starting point in the so-called dialogic or participatory turn in scientific and environmental governance in which practices claiming to be based on principles of participation, dialogue and citizen involvement have proliferated. The book goes beyond the buzzword of 'participation' in order to give empirically rich, theoretically informed and critical accounts of how citizen participation is understood and enacted in mass mediation and public engagement practices. A diverse series of studies across Europe and the US are presented, providing readers with empirical insights into the articulation of citizen voices in different national, cultural and institutional contexts. Building bridges across media and communication studies, science and technology studies, environmental studies and urban planning studies, Citizen Voices also offers a range of different theories and research methodologies which foreground the role of communication processes in scientific and environmental governance.
This article brings climate communication approaches to transformational climate learning by crit... more This article brings climate communication approaches to transformational climate learning by critically evaluating an experimental climate com-munication retreat that brought 20 young adults from across Europe together in Austria to co-create climate communications as a constitutive dimension of climate action. Structured around the transformational principles of interdisciplinarity, multidimensionality, collaborative project-based learning, reflexivity and action-oriented, the retreat spe-cifically focused upon the creative co-production, between peers, of climate communication as communicative meaning-making and action. The retreat experience transformed young people’s sociocultural under-standings of climate change, and climate communication as meaning-making and action, and increased their self and group efficacy. The key factors contributing to these transformations were: the forging of collective identity, peer-to-peer learning, emotional sharing, reflexive spaces, inspiring learning environment, interdisciplinary learning, multi-dimensional experiences, and collaborative project-based communica-tions. Situating co-created climate communication within transformational learning can help facilitate collective experiences beyond direct climate action participation, helping create education for social change.
Climate communication calls for new climate stories that move beyond apocalyptic imaginings. This... more Climate communication calls for new climate stories that move beyond apocalyptic imaginings. This article focuses on the role of young people in the collective reimagining of climate change through an interdisciplinary creative youth project that used speculative fiction and participatory play to enable a group of 14-to 15-year-olds in the United Kingdom to produce their own climate communications. Cocreated with a third-sector arts partner and evaluated through participant observation and questionnaires, the project found that creative and participatory approaches encouraged sociocultural and emotional engagements with climate change, increasing young people's feelings of efficacy. Yet, it also found that young people need careful support in understanding climate change as a multidimensional issue and in facilitating more positive and transformative climate-futures thinking. Interdisciplinary and creative climate communication education work thus needs to be prioritized to facilitate young people's collective and socially transformative engagements with climate change.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 2017
Since the mid-2000s, entertainment celebrities have played increasingly prominent roles in the cu... more Since the mid-2000s, entertainment celebrities have played increasingly prominent roles in the cultural politics of climate change, ranging from high-profile speeches at UN climate conferences, and social media interactions with their fans, to producing and appearing in documentaries about climate change that help give meaning to and communicate this issue to a wider audience. The role afforded to celebrities as climate change communicators is an outcome of a political environment increasingly influenced by public relations and attuned toward the media’s representation of political ideas, policies, and sentiments. Celebrities act as representatives of mass publics, operating within centers of elite political power. At the same time, celebrities represent the environmental concerns of their audiences; that is, they embody the sentiments of their audiences on the political stage. It is in this context that celebrities have gained their authority as political, social, and environmental “experts,” and the political performances of celebrities provide important ways to engage electorates and audiences with climate change action
More recently, celebrities offer novel engagements with climate change that move beyond scientific data and facilitate more emotional and visceral connections with climate change in the public’s everyday lives. Contemporary celebrities, thus, work to shape how audiences and publics ought to feel about climate change in efforts to get them to act or change their behaviors. These “after data” moments are seen very clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood. Yet, with celebrities acting as our emotional witnesses, they not only might bring climate change to greater public attention, but they expand their brand through neoliberalism’s penchant for the commoditization of everything including, as here, care and concern for the environment. As celebrities build up their own personal capital as eco-warriors, they create very real value for the “celebrity industrial complex” that lies behind their climate media interventions. Climate change activism is, through climate celebrities, rendered as spectacle, with celebrities acting as environmental and climate pedagogues framing for audiences the emotionalized problems and solutions to global environmental change. Consequently, celebrities politicize emotions in ways that that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and actions that responsibilize audiences and the public.
Veganism offers an important critique of unethical and unsustainable food production practices, y... more Veganism offers an important critique of unethical and unsustainable food production practices, yet vegans have been historically stigmatized in mainstream media. Given the recent prominence of celebrity vegans, this article asks, how might the cultural intermediary work of vegan celebrities make the ethical practice of veganism more accessible? And how do vegans' ethical concerns about the exploitative production and consumption of animals as food and by-products get reframed in the context of celebrity consumer culture? Bringing together philosophies of ethical veganism and eco-feminism with literature on ethical (food) consumption and celebrity culture, this article analyses the educational campaigning work on veganism by Hollywood actor, Alicia Silverstone and TV chat show host, Ellen DeGeneres. It finds that veganism is figured as a diet and lifestyle that foregrounds an ethics of care, compassion, kindness and emotion-about and for humans, animals and environment-consistent with ethical veganism. Yet these ethics are reworked through the commodity logic of celebrity culture to make it more marketable and thus consumable as a set of ideas and gendered lifestyle practices, where the individual choice is to be a healthy, happy and kind self. The tensions between ethical veganism as an intervention at the point of consumption within the production of exploitative and gendered human/animal/environmental relations, and the focus upon an individualised lifestyle politics through which celebrities maintain their commodity status, thus coalesce in the work of celebrity vegans.
Special Issue: ‘Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture’, Transformations, November 2007. , Nov 1, 2007
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Books by Julie Doyle
In this timely book, Julie Doyle explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Mediating Climate Change identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. It offers ways forward by exploring how climate change can be made more meaningful through, for example, innovative forms of climate activism, the reframing of meat and dairy consumption, media engagement with climate events and science, and artistic experimentation.
Doyle argues that cultural discourses have problematically situated nature and the environment as objects externalised from humans and culture. Mediating Climate Change calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations, in order for us to be able to more fully imagine and address the challenges climate change poses for us all."
Papers by Julie Doyle
More recently, celebrities offer novel engagements with climate change that move beyond scientific data and facilitate more emotional and visceral connections with climate change in the public’s everyday lives. Contemporary celebrities, thus, work to shape how audiences and publics ought to feel about climate change in efforts to get them to act or change their behaviors. These “after data” moments are seen very clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood. Yet, with celebrities acting as our emotional witnesses, they not only might bring climate change to greater public attention, but they expand their brand through neoliberalism’s penchant for the commoditization of everything including, as here, care and concern for the environment. As celebrities build up their own personal capital as eco-warriors, they create very real value for the “celebrity industrial complex” that lies behind their climate media interventions. Climate change activism is, through climate celebrities, rendered as spectacle, with celebrities acting as environmental and climate pedagogues framing for audiences the emotionalized problems and solutions to global environmental change. Consequently, celebrities politicize emotions in ways that that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and actions that responsibilize audiences and the public.
In this timely book, Julie Doyle explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Mediating Climate Change identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. It offers ways forward by exploring how climate change can be made more meaningful through, for example, innovative forms of climate activism, the reframing of meat and dairy consumption, media engagement with climate events and science, and artistic experimentation.
Doyle argues that cultural discourses have problematically situated nature and the environment as objects externalised from humans and culture. Mediating Climate Change calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations, in order for us to be able to more fully imagine and address the challenges climate change poses for us all."
More recently, celebrities offer novel engagements with climate change that move beyond scientific data and facilitate more emotional and visceral connections with climate change in the public’s everyday lives. Contemporary celebrities, thus, work to shape how audiences and publics ought to feel about climate change in efforts to get them to act or change their behaviors. These “after data” moments are seen very clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood. Yet, with celebrities acting as our emotional witnesses, they not only might bring climate change to greater public attention, but they expand their brand through neoliberalism’s penchant for the commoditization of everything including, as here, care and concern for the environment. As celebrities build up their own personal capital as eco-warriors, they create very real value for the “celebrity industrial complex” that lies behind their climate media interventions. Climate change activism is, through climate celebrities, rendered as spectacle, with celebrities acting as environmental and climate pedagogues framing for audiences the emotionalized problems and solutions to global environmental change. Consequently, celebrities politicize emotions in ways that that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and actions that responsibilize audiences and the public.