Full Description
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.
Contents
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
