Eighteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The premise of this study is that one of the most pressing demands of our time is to provide mobilizing communication about the climate change crisis. This is a pressing demand because communication can contribute to closing the present gap between the real threat represented by this global crisis and the necessary level of engagement for dealing with it in the near future. The purpose of this paper is to explain environmental organizations’ usage of multimodal discursive strategies in their mobilizing communication in order to fight cognitive limitations and lack of genuine commitment. The paper argues that a multimodal approach could defy the limits we encounter in attempting to both analyze and employ the articulation of several semiotic modes in climate change discourses where blame, culpability, concern and engagement are discursively legitimated. Drawing upon a multimodal framework, this paper explores in detail the integration of several semiotic modes like language, image and sound in a series of videos of well-known environmental organizations. The selected videos are discursively dealing with community building and involvement meant to alleviate the accelerating climate change crisis. Such a nuanced understanding of the semiotic modes’ potent interdependence and functional differentiation is meant to provide the means for rethinking and consequently improving the usage of multimodal discursive strategies and to move the study of climate change communication forward.