<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Recent years have seen another peak in global media attention to climate change. Driven by increasingly dire news about extreme weather, growing demands of systemic adaption and a new wave political activism, the current situation has increasingly been framed as a climate <italic>crisis</italic>. This introductory essay maps these recent developments and elaborates the conceptual potentials and limitations of the “crisis” frame. It also briefly reviews the state of the art of media research and situates the contributions of the issue into this landscape.
</abstract>

Helsinki Institute for Social Science and Humanities

Media and the Climate Crisis

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The climate crisis concerns the whole fabric of society. Local journalism can play a key role when cities are handling the problems. In this article, I analyse local media discourses on climate change in four Swedish cities that aim to be role models in the transition towards carbon neutrality. A discourse analysis of news articles and op-eds about the climate, combined with semi-structured interviews with journalists working at four different local newspapers, shows that the climate crisis is covered in all newspapers – even if the amount and ambition varies – including the ability to fill key roles as watchdog and educator. The newsrooms’ climate focus also had to give way when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Local decisions about transportation, food, and urban development are common topics and often debated in the local press. However, the prize-winning cities’ ambitious green plans to become climate neutral already by 2030 remain vague for the journalists and probably also their readers.
</abstract>

Agents of sustainable transition or place branding promotors?: Local journalism and climate change in Sweden

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Building on the framework of electoral contention, we investigate the interaction dynamics between social movements and political parties during elections. We argue that social media today is an important venue for these interactions, and consequently, analysing social media data is useful for understanding the shifts in the conflict and alliance structures between movements and parties. We find that Twitter discussions on the climate change movement during the 2019 electoral period in Finland reveal a process of pre-election approaching and post-election distancing between the movement and parties. The Greens and the Left formed mutually beneficial coalitions with the movement preceding the elections and took distance from one another after these parties entered the government. These findings suggest that research on movement-party interaction should pay more attention to social media and undertake comparative studies to assess whether the approaching-distancing process and its constituent mechanisms characterise movements beyond the climate strikes in Finland.
</abstract>

The climate change movement and political parties: Mechanisms of social media and interaction during the 2019 electoral period in Finland

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In this article, I investigate how recipients make sense of images that show symbolic actions by environmental activists during two recent United Nations Climate Change Conferences. Environmental advocacy groups are successful in creating visibility for their symbolic actions via news visuals, but little empirical evidence exists about how ordinary media recipients engage with this type of imagery. Can they understand the intended meaning of complex visual rhetoric used by environmental activists? I use think-aloud protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies which are used in processing these stylised visual claims. Results show that news photos rarely manage to communicate the intended meaning of symbolic actions. By systematically analysing various stages of visual frame processing, this study offers insights into specific configurations of the image-viewer relationship that cause high levels of ambiguity and prevent staged visual claims from being understood as intended. Yet I also find empirical evidence for a visual framing approach that works well and describe this recipe for effective communication via symbolic action photography.
</abstract>

Just “performance nonsense”?: How recipients process news photos of activists’ symbolic actions about climate change politics

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The final years of the 2010s marked an upturn in coverage on climate change. In Sweden, legacy media wrote more on the issue than ever before, especially in connection to the drought and wildfires in the summer of 2018 and the Fridays for Future movement started by Greta Thunberg. Reporting on climate change also reached unprecedented levels in the growingly influential far-right media ecosystem; from being a topic discussed hardly at all, it became a prominent issue. In this study, we use a toolkit from critical discourse analysis (CDA) to research how three Swedish far-right digital media sites reported on climate during the years 2018–2019. We show how the use of conspiracy theories, anti-establishment rhetoric, and nationalistic arguments created an antagonistic reaction to increased demands for action on climate change. By putting climate in ironic quotation marks, a discourse was created where it was taken for granted that climate change was a hoax.
</abstract>

Scare-quoting climate: The rapid rise of climate denial in the Swedish far-right media ecosystem

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Characterising the spreading of ideas within echo chambers is essential for understanding polarisation. In this article, we explore the characteristics of popular and viral content in climate change discussions on Twitter around the 2019 announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, where we find the retweet network of users to be polarised into two well-separated groups of activists and sceptics. Operationalising popularity as the number of retweets and virality as the spreading probability inferred using an independent cascade model, we find that the viral themes echo and differ from the popular themes in interesting ways. Most importantly, we find that the most viral themes in the two groups reflect different types of bonds that tie the community together, yet both function to enhance ingroup connections while repulsing outgroup engagement. With this, our study sheds light, from an information-spreading perspective, on the formation and upkeep of echo chambers in climate discussions.
</abstract>

Spread of tweets in climate discussions: A case study of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize announcement

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In this article, we advocate for media studies to adopt a systematic evolutionary-complexity model, in order to link the study of human culture and knowledge practices to the biosphere and geosphere, arguing that such global phenomena require a new kind of cultural science. For this purpose, we extend Juri Lotman's model of the semiosphere to the “digital semiosphere”, superseding inherited adversarial models in both mainstream media and media studies. We contrast the mediation of Covid-19 with that of the climate crisis, using Lotman's model to propose that, in the digital semiosphere, the global emergence of girl-led climate activism and far-right Covid-19 conspiracy groups indicates how new social classes are organising around the means of their own mediation. We discuss ways to study and forecast such emergent processes using the means of cultural data analytics and related approaches.
</abstract>

Emergent self-mediating classes in the digital semiosphere: Covid-19 conspiracies and the climate justice movement

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In this article, we argue that to capture the liveliness of how visual public debates like the climate controversy unfold online, we must replace snapshot and single-platform approaches with a method that can capture their temporal and cross-platform dynamics. We suggest that such a methodology could be assembled by combining image recognition, visual network analysis, and a quali-quantitative approach within a digital methods framework. We demonstrate the potential application of the methodology in a two-fold case study of 1) how the human–nature relation is visually depicted on Instagram and Twitter, and 2) how visual genres in the climate debate on Twitter change from 2015 to 2017. Through these experiments, we analyse more than a quarter million social media images to produce novel insights about the climate debate, while showcasing how the computational and visual capabilities of social science can be bridged to open up opportunities for mapping complex visual debates across platforms and time.
</abstract>

Bridging the computational and visual turn: Re-tooling visual studies with image recognition and network analysis to study online climate images

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Previous research has shown that Western visual journalism has represented climate change through certain repetitive and stereotypical imagery mainly consisting of catastrophic images of climate change impacts, images depicting technological causes and solutions, and images of politicians and activists. This imagery has proven to be distant, abstract, and ineffective in motivating personal engagement with climate change. In this article, we claim that visual journalism's representations of climate change are rooted in the consensual frameworks of human-centredness and consumption-centredness. Leaning on Jacques Ranciére's notion of “the politics of aesthetics”, we aim to challenge these frameworks. We suggest, with examples from visual arts, four aesthetic practices which could intervene in these frameworks: 1) revealing connectedness, 2) recognising agency, 3) compromising the attractions of consumerism, and 4) illuminating alternatives. We propose that visual representations, renewed through these aesthetic practices, could have an effect on how people connect to climate issues and imagine possibilities for agency in the climate crisis. Implementing these aesthetic practices would entail shifts in the sphere of visual journalism.
</abstract>

Aesthetic practices in the climate crisis: Intervening in consensual frameworks of the sensible through images

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This article starts with the observation that growth-oriented, techno-futurist narratives are predominant in climate change videogames. It then accounts for the lack of variety by arguing that these videogames are privileged expressions of premediation. Premediation cultivates a multiplicity of future scenarios, while at the same time delimiting them to suit presentist concerns, evoking a sense of inevitability and predictability strengthened by repetition. The iterative, branching temporality at work in this logic is deeply ingrained in videogames, as the trope of mastery through repetition and its analysis requires attentiveness to the affective dimensions of gameplay. If videogames are to engage with the climate crisis more productively, they must develop different temporalities in which the potentiality of the future is preserved. In this article, I analyse the games <italic>Fate of the World</italic> and <italic>The Stillness of the Wind</italic> to demonstrate how videogames premediate climate change and how they can explore other temporalities latent in the present.
</abstract>

Premediating climate change in videogames: Repetition, mastery, and failure

The difference between “alarmist” and “alarming”: Interview with Maxwell Boykoff

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023) The Return of Propaganda

Volume 4 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022) Media Events in the Age of Global, Digital Media

Volume 3 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021) Media and the Climate Crisis

Volume 2 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020) What is Nordic in the Nordic Media Studies?

Volume 1 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019) Disrupting Media Infrastructures

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

About the journal  Established in 2019, Nordic Journal of Media Studies is published once a year, and each volume focuses on a particular theme of media research. The journal is published by Nordicom, a centre for Nordic media and communication research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. The journal is supported by the Nordic Board for Periodicals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOP-HS).　  Nordic Journal of Media Studies follows a double-blind peer review process where all submitted manuscripts are made anonymous and judged by at least two independent and external anonymous scholars appropriate for the subject. Reviewers are asked to state their recommendation about whether the article should be published when submitting their review. Reviewers are also encouraged to provide comments that are for editors only, including concerns about misconduct or problems adequately assessing all parts of the manuscript. Reviewers are requested to disclose any potential conflict of interest. The comments provided by the reviewers inform the decision of the editorial team to publish or refuse the submission. Each issue is edited by different members of the editorial team, which may include invited external guest editors.  Aims &amp; scope  Nordic Journal of Media Studies is a peer reviewed international publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies.　  The editors stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical topics. The journal is open for theoretical contributions and empirical research, and combinations thereof. The editors also welcome critical approaches to media studies addressing questions of power, inequality, participation, and voice.　　　  Nordic Journal of Media Studies focuses on the interplay between the media and their cultural and social contexts. We are interested in the media as industries and institutions of modern society, but also in how they are woven into the fabric of everyday life as mobile and interactive technologies.　  The emergence of new social networks, changes in political communication, intensified datafication and surveillance of human interaction, and new dynamics between media, popular culture, as well as commercial markets, are important aspects of the changing relationship between the media, culture, and society.  Publications ethics and publication malpractice statement  Nordic Journal of Media Studies applies several editorial policies that all editors, reviewers, and authors are expected to adhere to throughout the publication process. These policies are based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. In instances where these editorial policies are breached, COPE guidelines will be followed.    Visit COPE's website to learn more  Visit the publisher to read the editorial policies  

Volume 3 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021) - Media and the Climate Crisis

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

Volume 3 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Media and the Climate Crisis

Media and the Climate Crisis

Agents of sustainable transition or place branding promotors?: Local journalism and climate change in Sweden

The climate change movement and political parties: Mechanisms of social media and interaction during the 2019 electoral period in Finland

Just “performance nonsense”?: How recipients process news photos of activists’ symbolic actions about climate change politics

Scare-quoting climate: The rapid rise of climate denial in the Swedish far-right media ecosystem

Spread of tweets in climate discussions: A case study of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize announcement

Emergent self-mediating classes in the digital semiosphere: Covid-19 conspiracies and the climate justice movement

Bridging the computational and visual turn: Re-tooling visual studies with image recognition and network analysis to study online climate images

Aesthetic practices in the climate crisis: Intervening in consensual frameworks of the sensible through images

Premediating climate change in videogames: Repetition, mastery, and failure

The difference between “alarmist” and “alarming”: Interview with Maxwell Boykoff

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