SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Inuit Circumpolar Council, Corporate Social Responsibility, Evangelical Environmentalism
1
Introduction
• This book takes a different approach. It attends to these debates not only as struggles over
complex and evolving “matters of fact” but also as debates about meaning, ethics, and morality.
• Climate change poses an inherent double bind for those invested in a variety of stances
associated with the communication, journalistic coverage, and public understanding of science
• The first half of the bind is this: climate change is ultimately an amalgam of scientific facts based
on modeling, projections, and empirical observations of current and historical records found in
tree rings, coral reefs, ice cores, sea ice cover, and other forms of data
• Acceptance of the premise of climate change requires a fidelity to and trust in scientific
methods, as well as institutional processes like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(ipcc) that collate, elevate, and summarize global research related to climate change
• How evidence is weighted, what expertise matters and when, and what kinds of research get
funded all reflect inherently cultural norms and ideals
• What this book asks is what role social movements and media play in how facts come to matter
for diverse publics and what kinds of debates this opens up about expertise, advocacy, and
professional norms and practices in science and media.
• Informing and convincing are easily collapsed in expectations of what role media should play in
societies, and many look to polling data to assess whether or not media are fulfilling such
expectations
• Climate change provides exemplary insight into how scientists and journalists are negotiating
professional detachment and distance, and by extension for publics now forced to sort through
claims and counterclaims that take to task scientists and journalists by charging them with bias,
exaggeration, or alarmism.
• societal ideals around science, media, and democracy
• how climate change becomes meaningful in diverse and specific groups and how this underlying
double bind of maintaining fidelity to science and expanding beyond it is negotiated by groups
that are both central and peripheral to evolving discussions about how to communicate climate
change
The Fieldwork
• Roles for journalists, scientists, and publics were very much up in the air
• Using methodologies from anthropology and sts, this book focuses on how five discursive
communities are actively enunciating the fact and meaning of climate change
o 1.Arctic indigenous representatives associated with the Inuit Circumpolar Council
o 2. Corporate social responsibility activists associated with Ceres
o 3. American evangelical Christians associated with Creation Care
o 4. Science journalists
o 5. Science and science policy experts
• My fieldwork centered on group and intergroup settings, and I conducted semistructured
interviews with the leading voices within each group between 2007 and 2009.
• I was interested in further investigating what seemed to be a mainstream drama full of mishaps,
spin, and argumentation, and understanding how scientists and media were working together (or
not) to inform the public about climate change
• Ceres is a corporate social responsibility group based in Boston that has successfully repositioned
and reframed climate change as “climate risk,” working to enroll Wall Street firms, insurance
companies, and many other national and multinational corporate leaders in their conferences and
efforts to push for legislation and regulation related to climate change.
• Each group has varying relationships with environmental movement
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Document Summary
Introduction: this book takes a different approach. Corporate social responsibility activists associated with ceres: 3. American evangelical christians associated with creation care: 4. Science and science policy experts: my fieldwork centered on group and intergroup settings, and i conducted semistructured interviews with the leading voices within each group between 2007 and 2009. In this sense, then, climate change as articulated in graphs, ipcc reports, and peer- reviewed scientific literature is not necessarily universal terminology outside the scientific community. 2: democratic and scientific ideals share this in common: that the discovery of objective facts and the dissemination of that information will drive action. But the line between information and action is anything but straightforward, and more often than not, information must traverse not only the vagaries of media channels for mass communication but a diversity of meaning- making, ethics, and morality. But a focus on just the facts doesn"t entirely blot out attendant social, economic, ethical, or moral factors.
