Interview with MEC@ICSJ team:
Vaia Doudaki, Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta and Elisabeth Wennerström
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Vaia: Well, as you know, the Work Package 5 covers the study area of media and the arts, within the broader project of environmental communication. This area of study, I think, was complex, in the sense that it had multiple dimensions, it was diverse, and it turned out to be very prolific, which is good. So, we really did manage to do a lot of things -more than I had originally thought that we would manage to do within this period of close to four years.
Very briefly, the research involved, first, mapping the fields of media -audiovisual media and social media- and the arts, in the domain of environmental communication in Sweden. One other area of study was, then, to analyse in depth some case studies of these identified entities that addressed environmental issues. Here, we focused more on the ideological struggles around the environment and how we understand the human-nature relations, but the research also involved engaging in loops of reflection, if I can say so -for instance, by mapping the ideologies that fit these struggles that we identified in the analysis of case studies.
Another area was exploring, but also applying, I would say, diverse ways of communicating about the environment and of creating knowledge about the environment. These ways include the involvement of societal partners in a number of activities in communicating and producing knowledge about the environment, but also, for instance, the organization of an exhibition involving professional and non-professional artists and academic researchers communicating, what we can say, creative ways about the discursive struggles around environmental issues.
So, I have been involved at different intensities in these areas of research, mainly in the mapping and the case study research activities, and in activities involving societal partners in co-producing knowledge about the environment.
Could you inform us a bit more about these activities?
Vaia: Well, apart from the, let’s say, formal obligations -what was promised that we would do when the funding was approved and the set of activities included, I think we did manage to engage in a broader range of both methods and ways of communicating about the environment than were originally planned, and a number of sub-projects came out later that were not originally scheduled -Gerardo and Elisabeth can talk more about these.
So, apart from formally abiding by the obligations in terms of the areas of study, the research conducted and its related publications, a number of sub-projects and loops of reflection that were not originally planned were created, which involved not only more direct forms of academic research, but also the connections with, what we call, the ‘network of societal partners’. These involved exploring more creative and diverse ways of communicating academically, but also producing and co-producing knowledge about the environment, by involving non-academics in the process.
Within this logic, the critical, the participatory, and the reflexive were the principles that drove the original research design, and these also fed into a series of sub-projects, such as the artist-in-residences (AiRs) that were not originally planned, or the project on Environmental Ideologies Map website that Gerardo has been involved, which, I think, turned out to be a great project that has also an educational value, as well as Elisabeth’s work on Wolf Talks.
All these were not originally planned, but they adhere to these principles of the critical, the participatory, and the reflexive, and expand the horizons of academic research, while bringing in tools and methods that are not used much in academic research and in environmental communication, more specifically.
Thank you, Vaia. What would you say, Gerardo, about your reflections on the work of WP5, and your part in it?
Gerardo: In addition to what Vaia has already summarised, I can provide a broad reflection on how this research activity of the past few years was able to produce a rich mapping of how different environmental discourses circulate in media and arts. That was a bit difficult because so far, environmental communication is very much centred on science communication, and mapping media and art discourses was kind of an innovative approach to environmental communication.
So, this entire process enriched a lot the way through which I was thinking about environmental communication, and really transformed my own way of research in environmental communication. I also learned a lot about new ways, like multimodal ways, of communicating the results of academic-scientific projects. From this point of view, it was very innovative for me, with regard to my personal part in this project but also for my future team experiences, to just break the wall between scientific-academic work and the overall civil society, non-governmental organisations, activism, and how this coupling effect of producing knowledge and sharing knowledge actually transform, and enrich the scientific process as the Environmental Ideologies Map website has demonstrated. And of course, I took advantage of engaging in this process by applying my global political economy expertise in a way that was kind of new for me. In the second stage (of case studies), I was responsible for the analysis of financial-economic journalists’ media products, and I think this process, of engaging in the understanding of how these neutral-grey journalistic media products carry all the meanings that are today so urgent to the construct, was something that really enriched both the activities of the larger research team and my own research.
So, the overall process was very insightful and rich to just start to think about new ways of environmental communication, both in breaking the walls between academic-scientific and societal understanding and in receiving this knowledge with regard to how this receiving actually works to enrich the whole process.
Thank you, Gerardo. I think this is an important and interesting point. And Elisabeth, you were involved extensively in one sub-project: the Wolf Talks exhibition in Sweden and the reception study conducted in this scope. Could you share your overall reflections about the research carried out in scope of WP5, which you are quite familiar by now, and your part in it?
Elisabeth: I joined WP5 as part of my Erasmus+ traineeship at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at Charles University in Prague, which I started following the completion of the Master’s Program in Social Sciences: Digital Media and Society'22 in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. I worked on the Wolf Talks project from mid-July 2022 to mid-January 2023, together with Nico Carpentier, who developed the project.
The Wolf Talks project started with an exhibition in central locations in Prague during the Fotograf Festival in Fall 2021. Afterwards, the Wolf Talks was also displayed at Hollar Gallery in Prague, and in February 2022, at the universities in Okara and Punjab in Pakistan.
As part of my work within WP5, I helped organize and bring the Wolf Talks exhibition to Sweden, and I conducted a reception study on the exhibition, for which an academic article is in progress which is co-authored with Nico Carpentier.
Working alongside the researchers of WP5 has been tremendously valuable to me, as a young researcher -to learn from their reflexive research approach, and to be part of WP5 with its focus on both material and discursive struggles on silencing/unsilencing nature. My motive for conducting an Erasmus+ Traineeship was to practice both research skills and to gain further experience. And thanks to the traineeship, I became more confident in the academic setting, which is a direct reflection of the participatory possibility that I was offered at the Institute for Communication Studies and Journalism at Charles University, to conduct research, as well as interact with the WP5 team at ICSJ -Nico, Gerardo, Vaia, and Derya.
Thank you, Elisabeth. We will talk more on Wolf Talks in a while. My next question is related more specifically to the research conducted in relation to the mapping and case studies. How do you think this research relates to, and how is it different from, the existing body of research in the field of environmental communication? What has inspired you most in doing this research?
Vaia: Well, the research, as you said, is embedded in the broad domain of environmental communication, with connections mostly to, let’s say, the critical strand, focusing on ideological dimensions, or power dynamics. I think the focus of the research on the element of struggle, with its ideological/discursive as well as material dimensions, and its focus on participatory, but also diverse, ways of researching and communicating about the environment and human-nature relations brought some new nuances, which we can say, is our contribution.
One thing that was quite inspiring for me in this process was the richness and diversity of knowledge about the environment that, I think, we do need to bring forward. This knowledge comes partly from focusing on non-academic actors. We could call it the affective knowledge: the knowledge of indigenous people, of people who live in the forest or with the forest, the knowledge of artists, of civil society actors and activists. It is valuable. It needs to be registered. Very specific, localised knowledge sometimes dies with the people, when the people die. So, I think it needs to be registered, and become more widely visible. So, this richness was something that was enriching also for me, as a scholar.
How do you think the research approach you have mentioned earlier facilitates infiltration into, and expression of, these affective knowledges?
Vaia: I think one of the strengths of this project is that it enriches and fertilises environmental communication with other fields -either intersectionally or transdisciplinarily- mostly from a critical perspective. Gerardo already referred to how he brought his specialisation and his knowledge to this field. There are many things to say about this, but I would say that it is not only how you theorize research, but also how you conduct research, because that is equally important.
So, as it concerns, let's say, the theoretical aspect or the scientific-academic aspects, I think, the research project facilitates this process by enriching and fertilising environmental communication with critical approaches that we have in political studies, but also in anthropology, and a number of intersectional approaches that do bring to light, for example, different regimes of discrimination. There, intersectionality does offer a toolbox that allows us to approach and try to understand, in a critical and careful way, these forms of affective knowledge, and try to bring them to light, while respecting the actors, the subjects that produce them. I think this is crucial, and this is why I mentioned that it is very important how you conduct research -how you integrate these voices, and these forms of ‘marginalized’ perspectives.
This is also about bringing in diverse tools at the methodological level: one studies participation, but one also practices participation while conducting research. So, it is important to have participatory methods in conducting the research itself; bringing the subjects to produce or co-produce, not treating them as objects. So, this is one way, at the methodological level. And having these loops or rounds of reflection is important both at the methodological and theoretical level. These are not disconnected, one feeds into the other. We talked already about how participation is a core component of this project, and it is both at the theoretical and the methodological level that concerns the research design, and at the empirical level where research is implemented.
And you, Gerardo -how do you think this research relates to, and how is it different from, the existing body of research in the field of environmental communication? What has inspired you most in doing this research?
Gerardo: Yes, absolutely. Of course, stepping into the field of environmental communication, which itself is a very young sub-discipline of media and communication studies, you see that there are already a lot of debates around the statute -if this discipline will step out from the current status of being a sub-discipline to become something else. In that sense, these past years of research within Mistra-EC project really put me in the position of having a clear idea of how to produce this transformation in the discipline. As I mentioned, we have plenty of studies about media and communication dynamics in communicating climate change that focus a lot on science communication, so it is something that is related to a very fixed idea of what science is.
Yet, the process of conducting this research in the past years allowed me to put together something that, so far, in my opinion, has been so separated: on the one hand, the ecocriticism approach to texts, literature, media, cultural artefacts that shape somehow our way of thinking about nature, and on the other hand political ecology approach that sees the material processes of transforming social ecological entanglements through power struggles. Our critical post-structural semiotic analysis of how language and discourses shape the ontological understanding of what nature is offers promising conceptual bridges to get beyond this disciplinary separation. Of course, we are talking about the process of investigating media and arts in a specific national context, of Sweden, with specific socio-historical dynamics shaping what the environment is and what it is not. I think this is a very contradictory context, in which there are the vanguardists of sustainability policies, but at the same time, these are very much based on extractivist policies and on a certain relationship with the people inhabiting the land -in a different and opposite way with regard to how to deal with the land, with the animals, and with the more-than-human world.
So, I think that our research was able to put together these very different strands of environmental humanities in this context -putting the attention on texts, as in ecocriticism, on political ecologist struggles over the environment, and on more epistemological-ontological aspects that are rooted in poststructuralist semiotic In my opinion, this is a good trampoline to innovate environmental communication as a discipline and to open a new debate within the field. I think that this work really contributed -well maybe I am exaggerating (chuckles)- but I think that this work really is a step forward towards, let’s say, decolonising environmental communication from certain Western-centric, anthropocentric, or science-centric understanding of environmental communication.
I think all of you well mentioned about the contributions of this research to opening up to new perspectives about environmental and sustainability issues, including more marginalized perspectives. What do you think are the limitations in this regard?
Vaia: Definitely, the need to create spaces for alternative and marginalized perspectives is vital given the urgency of the environmental problems. I think what we already knew, but was still impressive for me to see in this research, was how strong the hegemony of anthropocentrism is. So, even if there are alternative views circulating, it is interesting that they cannot find outlets or ways to become relevant, not only aesthetically, let's say, or philosophically, but at the level of influencing environmental policy as well.
Thus, there is work that needs to be done, but I think the problem is that it cannot be done by one group of actors, or by one field only. We do need these broad societal alliances between scientists, academic researchers, civil society, political actors, artists that support these causes, in order to make these alternative ways of thinking about the environment and human-nature relations more mainstream, one could say, and impactful. I am not saying that it is easy, it is not an easy struggle. The hegemony of anthropocentrism which is supported by the capitalist mode of socioeconomic organisation does look so strong, so powerful. But, as we know, no hegemony is uncontested. So, no matter how strong it is, I think there is hope. I am not saying that there is an easy way, but I think the key, for me, is building broad societal alliances, which does take time and effort.
Yes, thank you Vaia. What do you think Gerardo, about the limitations?
Gerardo: I think that the limitations are the same limitations when broadly referring to the academic scientific work regarding any kind of struggle, and in particular, with regard to the environmental struggles, especially that of the indigenous communities. There is a very structured, institutionalised way of producing knowledge that somehow tries to ‘smuggle’ alternative knowledge within institutional places. But, in the end, the main limitation of these kinds of practices is that we are always speaking on behalf of someone or something else, which was one of the main ethical reflections of the WP5’s activities, as also emphasized by Nico Carpentier’s work on Silencing/Unsilencing Nature.
As academic researchers, we can do our best to take this idea further, but only massive alliances between humans and non-human communities can really transform the socio-ecological mess in which we are right now. Even if I am not so optimistic about whether we will manage to do that, it is important to keep on doing that, let's believe that we are still on time to do something to get out of this disastrous path. So, I would say that the limitation of academic research, especially in environmental communication, is the same as what we experience with the institutional forms of producing knowledge.
And I think this brings us to the participatory dimensions of the WP5’s work. As opposed to speaking on behalf of others, this work involves collaborations between different societal partners and researchers, and some tools were developed to facilitate these collaborations. Vaia, since you are the one who coordinated this part of the project, could you share with us your reflections about this participatory dimension and the work carried out in this scope?
Vaia: As I mentioned earlier, the participatory dimension has been a core and integral part of the project from the very beginning, and so is the focus on the importance of participation. So, the project involved societal partners in diverse activities that aimed to enhance collaboration in creating knowledge about the environment and human-nature relations in ways that are actually relevant for society, not only for the academic world.
This participatory dimension feeds into the need for broad societal alliances that I was talking about, but also it is founded in the recognition that academia is not the only field of knowledge production. It is definitely a privileged field, but it is not the only one.
So, the activities within the project that involves non-academic actors were varied -ranging from their involvement in lectures or talks, communicating their knowledge, skills, viewpoints, and expertise, to participation in artistic projects, involving both artists and non-artists in participatory ways, and to participatory processes of creation and communication of knowledge about the environment. In addition to that, non-academic actors have been involved more directly in academic research, for example, by participating in the analysis of films and television series that address environmental issues, using academic tools of analysis.
Of course, things have been far from perfect. There are always issues of control, and while there is the care to create more balanced relations of participation, I think, one should acknowledge that the projects that are designed and led by academic actors might still keep the privileged roles for academic actors. Therefore, it requires a constant consciousness and reflection to actually create spaces, where the forms and types of participation and interaction become more balanced, so that it does not end up being, let's say, pseudo participation. So, it is always a struggle; yet, it has been very enriching for the reasons that I explained earlier, but it is not easy.
As it concerns the specific project, there are always practical issues or issues concerning limited resources, and so on. Also, the lockdown during the COVID pandemic did not help in keeping the societal partners involved. So, distance and isolation did play a role. There are always challenges in maintaining the interest or engagement of societal partners. It does take constant efforts to give time and space to all actors involved in these processes to have their own positions, skills, talents, and knowledges communicated and shared. The circumstances are always imperfect, and one needs to make things work in imperfect conditions.
In which ways, do you think, these collaborations can help to better engage the society in understanding and communication of environmental issues? Particularly in terms of the spill-over effects when it comes to the societal partners and their organizations? I know that it is not easy to tell, but do you have any observations about this?
Vaia: Well, in some of the sub-projects we have undertaken within WP5, such as the participatory art projects and some others that involve societal actors, what I have seen is that societal actors often do not realize that they have their own expertise and knowledge, and sometimes they feel that they lack the language or tools to express and communicate their perspectives and knowledge. So, some of these collaborations may have offered this realisation, as well as the tools, or the language, also through the interactions in co-developing new knowledge. So, I think such collaborations may activate or empower people to engage in environmentally related activities, that interest them, of course. It is true that already interested people engage in such activities, and the issue is how to influence or engage more people, to talk about the broader spill-over effects that you mentioned.
This does not happen automatically, but one reflection is that each one of us, and each one of these actors, who socialise and get together with other people that share the same interests, first, they might feel that they are more empowered and get more engaged, or get more energy to continue doing what they are doing and to influence their social environment, as for example, one of the participants of the artistic project mentioned. And then, you need to have different levels and spheres of influence, and each one of us can function in our own environment. So, in research, this means being critical, and conducting research in a critical fashion, and exposing these issues, but this also applies to education. Because, as researchers, we also function as educators at the university level, and that also means to be able to contact and influence people that can influence others.
Here, I should note that I am talking about education at all levels. In the broader sphere of societal partners, there might also be educators at other levels: teachers or professors in schools, not necessarily at the university. And this is related to what I have been saying about broad societal alliances, and it is not easy, but if more people are interested in these issues in their respective fields and activities, they can, sort of, push for changes in their field of activity -whether it is a university, whether it is academic research, whether it is secondary education- to bring in the logics of, I would say, environmental literacy as citizen literacy through our education. This needs centralized actions, but each one of us, I think, can push for or activate our environments and coordinate this process.
Thank you very much, Vaia for these detailed reflections. And Elizabeth, I think these points also connect with your work within WP5. Could you tell us a bit about your reflections on the Wolf Talks exhibition in Sweden and the reception study conducted in this scope?
Elisabeth: Well, just like all research within WP5, the Wolf Talks project explored the power hierarchies between humans and nature, in this case between human animals and non-human animals, to show how nature has often been silenced.
Briefly, Wolf Talks is an interventionist and change-oriented media and arts research exhibit and research project. It combines 12 photographs of wolves with cat filters and theoretical questions, e.g., about agency, voice, and empowerment. Like the installation during the Fotograf Festival in Prague during Fall 2021, the Wolf Talks images were exhibited to general audiences in shop owners’ windows and on bulletin boards in the city center of Uppsala, Sweden, during two weeks at the end of October and beginning of November 2022 (click here to read more about Elisabeth’s reflections on the exhibit, its societal partners and the participatory process).
As you also mentioned, Wolf Talks in Sweden exhibition included a reception study which was suggested by Nico in line with the participatory focus of the project. The participants who took part in the reception study came from civil society organizations, non-governmental and non-profit organizations with environmental programs and members in the Uppsala region. The study examined how these participants interpreted the exhibition, exploring power hierarchies, support, and resistance as experienced by these respondents, while reflecting on the dynamics of unsilencing nature.
I found the reception study interesting for several reasons, not in the least, in meeting with the focus group participants. It was very clear, in listening to these participants, that the remediation of power hierarchies between humans and nature forges a complex discussion -one that they found critically important. The exhibitiontouched upon difficulties in sharing communicative space, with social media oftentimes intensifying polarized positions, and strategic communications material leaning perhaps too much on traditionalist perspectives to reach a broad audience. The participants talked about how difficult it is to talk about wolves, not only in public debates which some of them had experienced in mainstream media and social media, but also in their organizations and -even on a personal level- among family and friends. To talk about wolves was so difficult that they sometimes chose not to. In other words, not only nature but also humans at times are silenced.
In summary, the participants had a broad interest in human-nature relations, yet had experience on being subjected to silencing and to power hierarchies. The Wolf Talks project articulated how centrally important the research of WP5 is in the society.
Based on your experiences with the exhibition, how do you think arts-based research can contribute to producing and communicating knowledge about environment and sustainability issues? What do you think are the limitations?
Elisabeth: Arts-based research is still rare in the social sciences. The limitations, however, could be overcome. Arts-based research can reach a wider field of audiences and participants,and it is a practice to reach more horizontal perspectivesWith respect to participants and their experiences, I believe it is an area that could be explored even more. Not to mention that conducting arts-based research is another way of presenting research and engaging audiences, perhaps a broader audience, in the research itself.
And fittingly, one of the Wolf Talks project’stheoretical concepts is agency. As Barad (2007) wrote: “Agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements” (p. 54)*.
Thank you very much to all of you for this nice and quite informative conversation!
All: Thank you.