[Commlist] New book on Critical Environmental Communication in a time of urgency

  Critical Environmental Communication: How Does Critique Respond to the
  Urgency of Climate Change?


  by Murdoch Stephens

How do contemporary critical thinkers find a way to work between the 
doubt that grounds their thinking and the knowing needed to ground 
emancipatory political struggles? In this overview of four contemporary 
thinkers’—Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, and Bruno 
Latour—approaches to critique and climate change, communication scholar 
Murdoch Stephens discusses and analyses the fissures, elisions, and 
paradoxes that inform critical theory. This book delves into how 
critical theory offers important insights for those interested in 
climate change, but also how critical theory faces challenges to its 
constitution when faced with issues that are both urgent and yet require 
a scientific rigour that is not the specialty of critique. Written from 
the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of environmental 
communication,Critical Environmental Communication: How Does Critique 
Respond to the Urgency of Climate Change?argues for re-orienting the 
field towards the tensions and possibilities drawn from these four authors.

Reviews of the book:
Murdoch Stephens has taken on the difficult task of sorting through and 
understanding much ignored critical theory relevant to environmental 
communication and has written an essential read for anyone interested in 
critical theory and environmental communication.
*—**Richard Doherty, Chair, International Environmental Communication 
Association*


Bucking a bias that insists on environmental communication as a crisis 
discipline that justifies an incoherent activism and smug moralism, 
inCritical Environmental CommunicationMurdoch Stephens advocates a 
return to thinking and theory. In a sustained and thoughtful engagement 
with such provocative thinkers as Latour, Žižek, Morton, and Sloterdijk, 
Stephens forces us to reconsider the grounds of our thinking and 
activism. As Stephens’ vital intervention argues, theory is not a 
necessary detour but the way itself that enables a thinking and acting 
that exceeds a mindless activism that pursues the media-amplified 
crisisdu jour.
*—**Kevin DeLuca, The University of Utah*


By bringing four notable and provocative theorists into the orbit of 
environmental communication, Stephens’s work will reinvigorate 
discussions among environmental communication scholars about the 
possibilities for critique and critical scholarship.
*—**Steve Schwarze, University of Montana*

More details at the Rowman website 
<https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498570879/Critical-Environmental-Communication-How-Does-Critique-Respond-to-the-Urgency-of-Climate-Change#>. 



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