Special Issue Editor and Contact: Dr. Hanna E. Morris, University of Toronto, (_hanna.morris /at/ utoronto.ca) <mailto:(hanna.morris /at/ utoronto.ca)>_
Abstracts due: November 4, 2024 Full papers due for peer review: April 4, 2025
The climate journalist Amy Westervelt tweeted in August 2023 amid a visible increase in the criminalization and policing of climate activists: “It’s troubling to watch the global dehumanization of climate activists, who are often painted as annoying mosquitoes, spoiled brats, or ‘terrorists.’” That same year, /The Guardian/ reported a striking rise in the police crackdown on climate activists worldwide (Lakhani, Gayle, & Taylor, 2023) while vigilantes in Germany brutalized climate
protesters (Singelnstein & Obens, 2023) and police in Atlanta, Georgia killed a peaceful climate justice activist named Tortuguita who opposed the construction of “Cop City” in the Weelaunee Forest (Gordon, 2024; Lennard, 2023). Within and across borders, climate activists are being cast as a threat to national stability. News media and politicians from the so-called
“moderate” center to the far right are leveraging racist, misogynistic, and ageist tropes to discursively transform young climate justice activists into climate justice “warriors” who must be controlled and contained for the sake of the nation (Morris, 2025). Far right violence and demands to deport activists combine with nativist calls for tighter borders and higher walls to keep “undesirables” out. At the same time,increasing numbers of preppers are clinging to a libertarian lifeboat
ethics and envision a world of warring factions with limited resources amid climatic and civilizational breakdown. With this apocalyptic vision in tow, Silicon Valley billionaires are feverishly building bunkers in New Zealand (e.g., Peter Thiel) and fantasize about colonies on Mars (e.g., Elon Musk). Part of the draw of apocalypse bunkers and space colonies for men like Thiel and Musk is their stated disdain for social and climate justice “warriors” and the “woke” left that question,
critique, and impede their every desire and authority (i.e., democratic oversight). In a future of bunkers and space pods, techno-libertarians can live free and unencumbered (O’Connell, 2018). This special issue of the journal /Environmental Communication/ is motivated by the question of how different modes of climate communication (e.g., news media, social media, blogs, digital newsletters, film, photography, art, literature, podcasts, radio, television, museum exhibitions, political speeches, etc.) either legitimize and entrench antidemocratic politics (e.g., reactionary backlash against climate activists, nativist demands for tighter borders, libertarian dreams of bunkers and space colonies) or open up the possibility for contestation and the consideration of alternative visions for how to comprehensively respond to the complexities of climate change via more inclusive, justice-oriented, and robustly democratic decision-making processes. The editor of this special issue Dr. Hanna E. Morris, University of Toronto, (_hanna.morris /at/ utoronto.ca) <mailto:(hanna.morris /at/ utoronto.ca)>_) invites papers from a variety of critical methodologies, geographical contexts, and academic positions
(e.g., PhD students, emerging scholars, and senior scholars) that engage with this question.
Possible topics include but are _not_ limited to: * Increased policing of climate activists and the role of news media in legitimizing this criminalization * Climate activist-produced digital and social media that contest derogatory mainstream media representations of their peers * Popular film representations of climate change that fearmonger about “mass climate migrations” * Manifestos from ecofascists * Cli-Fi texts that entrench, negotiate, and/or contest petro-nationalism and petro-masculinity * Online trolling, doxing, and hate speech against climate activists on social media platforms * Illustrative renderings of climate bunkers and/or space colonies * Manifestos from ecomodernists and techno-libertarians * Climate justice policy proposal documents and/or speeches from policymakers and progressive thinktanks * Art and/or literature that represent Indigenous Futurisms, Afrofuturisms, and Radical Futurisms * Popular writings on radical hope * Activist-produced art, films, writings, podcasts, etc. that represent what “just climate futures” and a “just transition” look like and mean * Indigenous media and decolonization * Empirically grounded theoretical engagements with nationalism, authoritarianism, ecofascism, techno-libertarianism, or neoliberalism in relation to climate change communication and politics