Framing Sustainability in Language and Communication

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-71916-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 292 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 562 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in Language and Communication

This collection brings together established and emerging scholars for a critical framing of sustainability through the lens of language and communication, social semiotics, and media studies. The volume underscores the importance of re-envisioning sustainability around not only climate change and biodiversity loss but in broader systems of ecological, social, and economic imbalances on a global scale.

The book begins with a visual essay which provides a semiotic foundation for understandings of sustainability across disciplinary approaches in the chapters that follow. Subsequent chapters are organized around four thematic parts: reframing sustainability in a colonial world; the semiotics of sustainability; communicating sustainability in everyday life; and sustainability communication in the arts. A closing commentary by Crispin Thurlow offers critical reflections on sustainability within language and communication research and beyond.

This book will be of interest to scholars addressing sustainability across diverse disciplines, including language and communication, social semiotics, linguistic anthropology, environmental communication, media studies, and development studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kosatica, Maida

Smith, Sean P

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

 

List of Figures

List of Contributors

 

Introduction

Framing Sustainability

Maida Kosatica & Sean P. Smith

 

1. Visual Essay: “Banal Sustainability”

Sean P. Smith

 

SECTION I: Reframing sustainability in a colonial world

2. Rethinking Sustainability through Indigenous Language Futures

Bernard C. Perley

3. Chronotopes of Sustainability and the Coloniality of Corporate Initiatives

Jessica Pouchet

4. Climate Crisis and Animal Exploitation: Historical Materialism and The Reformulation of Industrial Discourses

Diego L. Forte

 

SECTION II: The semiotics of sustainability

5. The semiotics of “the unfinished”: The lost highway and other signifiers of unsustainable development

Anders Björkvall & Arlene Archer

6. Creating shared value: A Social Semiotic Analysis of ESG Discourse on Social Media

Esterina Nervino, Karen C. K. Choi & Jiaying Wang

7. Signs of sustainability? The semiotic dimension of urban plants

Laura Imhoff

 

SECTION III: Communicating sustainability in everyday life

8. Responding to lifestyle discourses in climate conversations

Julia Coombs Fine

9. . Sustainable Architecture Studio Discourse: When the decoupling of communication, intentions, and outcomes presents aspirations for alternative futures

Sherif Goubran

10. Reclaiming Sustainability for the Anthropocene

Gavin Lamb

 

SECTION IV: Sustainability communication in the arts

11. ‘Sustainability’ in the Arts and Culture Sector: A Discourse Analytic Appreciative Inquiry 

Kate Power

12. Climate In the Club: Conveying Sustainable Futures Through Eco Grime and Solarpunk Music

Morgan Sleeper & Jessica Love-Nichols

13. Staying away from Cthulhu rather than Embracing the Cthulhucene: Human and Non-Human Relations in Netflix’s The Sea Beast

Emelie Fälton & Polina Ignatova

 

Epilogue

14. Seeing Through Sustainability and the Wasteful Rhetorics of (un)knowing

Crispin Thurlow

 

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Maida Kosatica is Professor of Urban Semiotics and Semantics in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research interests include semiotic landscapes, multimodal critical discourse analysis, environmental communication and displacement, and discourses on ecosystem services.

Sean P. Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research examines how discourse and (social) media shape development and practice within the contexts of the environment and tourism, informed by field research in Myanmar (Burma) and the Arabian Gulf.