Archive for 2021

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[Commlist] A Call to Arms/For Books - Global Crises and Media Book Series

Mon Nov 22 14:13:40 GMT 2021







A CALL TO ARMS/FOR BOOKS

Covid-19 and COP26 emanate from the same source: a world-in-crisis. A world now experiencing multiple, overlapping, and accelerating existential threats to humanity and life on earth as we know it. To what extent, why and how has news media reporting, both nationally and transnationally, diminished, distanced or entirely dissimulated Covid-19 as an expression of our impending planetary emergency? To what extent are environmental externalities and the incessant pursuit of unsustainable growth investigated, exposed and deliberated in news reporting of climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological collapse? When and where have journalists around the world sought to make the connections and join up the dots between the human-spawned global crises of zoonotic diseases, environmental despoilation, bio-diversity loss, climate change, food and water insecurity, international inequality, population movements and increasing conflicts? Or, if not, why not? To what extent and how has indigenous wisdom and traditional environmental practices been recognized in the mediated public debate about how to respond to today’s rapidly compounding crises centered on the breaking relationship with nature and the overshooting of ecosystems? And where if at all are these and other pressing questions of our time being asked and pursued by researchers in the context of today’s planetary emergency? As groups like Extinction Rebellion and civil society more widely begin to mobilize in response to the growing sense of ‘ontological insecurity’ presaged by accelerating, compounding existential threats, has the field of media and journalism studies become too parochial in its preferred national outlooks, established academic agendas and entrenched silos of disciplinary interest to see and engage with the bigger existential picture?

How and when can journalism be encouraged to step up to the scale of the impending/unfolding planetary emergency and send daily dispatches from the frontlines of climate change, biodiversity loss and unsustainable ecological degradation whilst holding corporations and powerholders - along with the rest of us - to account? When will the necessary holistic/ecological consciousness of a world-in-crisis begin to take root and shape the moral horizons and norms of journalism storytelling and practice, and in ways that culturally resonate, deliberatively engage, and, potentially, help to politically mobilize? How can journalism’s communicative architecture, including the enhanced connectivity of social media be creatively harnessed and deployed to raise the alarm and publicly debate the necessary responses, both cognitively recognizing and culturally affirming the nature, scale and complexity of the tasks ahead and the profound societal transformations needed?

The Global Crises and Media Series, published by Peter Lang, welcomes proposals for authored monographs as well as edited collections from concerned media and communication academics around the world that can help to redress these and other silences in our field, and which set out to engage with both the ‘problematic’ and the ‘possible’ in the communication of today’s planetary emergency.

I look forward to hearing from you if you would like to discuss your ideas for a book in the series. For details of published books in the series please see below and visit the Peter Lang website:

https://www.peterlang.com/search?searchstring=Global+Crises+and+the+Media
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