[Commlist] Call for Papers: Journal of Environmental Media (Special Issue: ‘Seeing the (In)Justice of Sustainability: Visualizing Inequality at the Centre of Climate Change Communication’)

Call for Papers: Journal of Environmental Media 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-environmental-media>


*Special Issue: ‘Seeing the (In)Justice of Sustainability: Visualizing 
Inequality at the Centre of Climate Change Communication’ *


Guest Editors:


  *

    Juliet Pinto, Associate Professor, Bellisario College of
    Communications, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

  *

    Robert E. Gutsche, Jr., Senior Lecturer in Critical Digital Media
    Practice, Department of Sociology (Media and Cultural Studies),
    Lancaster University, UK

  *

    Tori Zheng Cui, Graduate Student, Bellisario College of
    Communications, The Pennsylvania State University, USA


We know that environmental change due to massive global warming 
negatively influences the world’s poorest and most-marginalized the 
most, as do the corporate and collective actions themselves that drive 
greenhouse gas emissions. With greater urgency, media scholarship – and 
practice – must now turn to the wicked problems associated with forms of 
human inequality that are sometimes linked to efforts to develop local 
and global sustainability: racialized gentrification of urban areas to 
form wetlands creates a forced migration of residents. The development 
of environmentally sound (and expensive) housing pushes out the poor. 
Mainstreamed media narratives of climate change activists elevate 
particular people and parts of the world over others. And yet such 
effects of sustainability are often invisible or missing from mediated 
discourses and arenas. As notions of sustainability become more 
normalized as key to our shared social futures, they can remain tied to 
long-standing issues of racialized environmentalism shaping government 
and corporate decisions, as well as individual and collective 
interpretations of curbing climate change. ‘Climate change is the result 
of a legacy of extraction, of colonialism, of slavery’, Elizabeth 
Yeampierre, cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance, told PBS in the US 
in 2020. ‘The truth is that the climate justice movement, people of 
color, indigenous people, have always worked multi-dimensionally because 
we have to be able to fight on so many different planes.’ We share in 
this concern.


This special issue surrounds issues of sustainability and its effect 
(and potential for effect) on widening inequalities and does so through 
discussions on visual and digital communication, including, but not 
limited to, digital photography, data visualizations, augmented reality, 
novel apps, virtual reality, television and film, memes and social media 
images, and digital and broadcast journalism. Such interrogation 
highlights intersections of inequalities that complicate efforts and the 
very definitions of sustainability, while building theory that 
problematizes roles of visual narratives – and narrating – in the 
digital age, particularly as mainstream media focus on only specific 
aspects of sustainable future(s).


Indeed, the term ‘sustainability’ itself suggests a maintaining of 
modern-day living conforms, consumption, and lived experiences and 
breeds, therefore, questions about the peculiarities of sustainability 
and how we ‘see’ them. Contributions with images are encouraged.


Articles for this special issue surrounding intersections of 
sustainability and increasing inequalities might include:


  *

    Innovation of methods and modes of visually communicating
    inequalities of sustainability in journalism, entertainment,
    corporate communication, and VR.

  *

    The use of GIS visualization to map and monitor unequal forms of
    sustainability initiatives within particular environments.

  *

    Interpretation of sustainability discussions and supplementary
    visual evidence from graphics and data visualization through an
    approach of STS.

  *

    Discussions around digital cultural studies and visuals in dominant
    and problematic representations of sustainable living.

  *

    The elevation or exploration of ‘environmentalism of the poor’
    through photojournalism or immersive mediums.

  *

    Social media memes and communication that elevate the visual in
    discussions on sustainability and inequalities.

  *

    Interrogation of racialized forms of gentrification in the name of
    ‘sustainability’.

  *

    Avenues of understanding through data science to highlight
    oppositional or subjugated positions and communities in forming
    solutions to environmental decline.

  *

    Global perspectives on influences of cultural industries in seeing
    and communicating sustainable social futures that involve interests
    of justice.

  *

    Examinations of emotional and immersive media to promote
    complication in understanding calls-to-action related to sustainable
    living.

  *

    Examples and strategies for innovative technology use to form
    citizenry and/or community activism to resist oppressive natures of
    sustainable communication and capitalistic actions for the good of
    the climate.


Abstracts of no more than 500 words for consideration should be sent to 
Tori Zheng Cui at (cuizheng84 /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(cuizheng84 /at/ gmail.com)> by 
1 July 2021. Articles selected for peer-review will be due 1 October 
2021, should be 7000 words, and should conform with Harvard Style. 
Questions can be directed to Tori Zheng Cui at (cuizheng84 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(cuizheng84 /at/ gmail.com)>.


Read the full CFP here >> 
https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/56582/1/JEM_CfP_march_21_2.pdf 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/56582/1/JEM_CfP_march_21_2.pdf>


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