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

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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