Interview with Marcus Bussey: Co-creation for sustainable futures

In this interview, educator and futurist Marcus Bussey talks about the role of imagination and creative practices in sustainability transformations, the co-creation labs run by the Mistra-EC team at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, and more!

Read the interview with Marcus Bussey here

Interview with Caitlin Franzmann: AiR at the Sunshine Coast (with Marcus Bussey)

Caitlin, resident artist for Mistra-EC’s AiR programme at the Sunshine Coast, tells us about her works, her residency project, and the role of art-academia collaborations in environmental communication -with Marcus, the academic host of the AiR@USC, joining in as guest!

Read the interview with Caitlin Franzmann here

New article: Behind the narratives of climate change denial and rights of nature: sustainability and the ideological struggle between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in two radical Facebook groups in Sweden

The article by Vaia Doudaki and Nico Carpentier, titled Behind the narratives of climate change denial and rights of nature: sustainability and the ideological struggle between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in two radical Facebook groups in Sweden (open access) has been published in the Journal of Political Ideologies.

New article: Google Search and the creation of ignorance: The case of the climate crisis

The article by Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl, titled Google Search and the creation of ignorance: The case of the climate crisis (open access) has been published in Big Data & Society.

New article: Shades of technocratic solutionism: A discursive-material political ecology approach to the analysis of the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringsliv (‘Sustainable business’)

The article by Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta and Nico Carpentier titled Shades of technocratic solutionism: A discursive-material political ecology approach to the analysis of the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringsliv (‘Sustainable business’) has been published in Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication.

New article: Algorithmically embodied emissions: The environmental harm of everyday life information in digital culture

The article by Jutta Haider, Malte Rödl, and Sofie Joosse titled Algorithmically embodied emissions: The environmental harm of everyday life information in digital culture (open access) has been published in Information Research.

Events: Moulding Nature: Discursive Struggles over Environment

The exhibition, “Moulding nature: Discursive struggles over the environment” will take place at the Stockholm-based arts centre Färgfabriken, from 26 August until 26 November 2023.

The exhibition is curated by Nico Carpentier, Daniel Urey, and Emilia Rosenqvist, as part of WP5 coordinated by the Mistra-EC team at ICSJ.

Structured around a map of the multitude of environment-related discourses that frame our ways of thinking about the environment, nature and ourselves, the exhibition presents artistic interventions inspired by the academic reflections behind the map’s construction, and collaborative art works by artists and non-artists produced through a series of participatory arts projects organised in the year running up to the exhibition. The program also involves series of training workshops and film screenings connected to the exhibition.

Click here for information about the exhibition.

Events: Power and Gardens: A reflection on the taming of nature

On 27 April, 2023, Nico Carpentier will give a lecture on “Power and Gardens: A reflection on the taming of nature” at the Nationalmuseum in Sweden. Driven by a discursive-material analysis, the talk is a reflection on how gardens are locations where nature is tamed, and how they often perform an anthropocentric ideology that is strengthened by a series of other discourses, such as capitalism and colonialism. The event, organised in cooperation with Färgfabriken art centre, will also host Martin Olin’s lecture on “Grazing animals – biodiversity or beauty” on the same day.

Click here for more information on the event.

Read more about the Power and Gardens film here.

Past Events: WP5 Open Session: Mediating Strategies for Environmental Communication

Organised on March 15, 2023, during Mistra-EC Programme Meeting, the session focused on the strategies used by media professionals to communicate environmental issues. In the session, WP5 researchers presented the initial findings of their analysis of the selected cases from Swedish audio-visual media, and a group discussion was organised with the sessions’ participants around seven selected frames from the analyzed media, to articulate a more environment-centred narrative strategy.

Past Events: Thin Ice Participatory Analysis Workshop

Another MEC@ICSJ session at Mistra-EC Programme Meeting was the closed session for the working group of the participatory analysis of the television series Tunn Is/Thin Ice, which was also organised on March 15, 2023. In this workshop, the group members discussed the findings of the first cycle of analysis and worked collectively towards the second cycle of analysis and the joint writing of an academic article.

New Modes of Environmental Communication in Yogyakarta

Following Czech Republic and Sweden, the film "New Modes of Environmental Communication: Four Street Art Experiments" has been screened on March 5, 2023 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia -the home place of its production.

The 23:34-minute documentary by Ali Minanto features the experiment, where WP5 researchers commissioned four Indonesian street artists to produce four street artworks in Yogyakarta: “Welcome New Pollution” by Anagard, “Plant Trees Plant Hope” by Guerrillas, “Plastic Reduce” by Kinky Twenty, and “Planting Determination” by Young Surakarta.

The screening, which brought together street artists, academics, and the community, took place at ViaVia Jogja, Prawirotaman in Yogyakarta, together with the street art exhibition opening ceremony ‘Jalan Lingkar’ (Ring Road). The screening started with the introduction of the documentary, and was followed by an informal discussion with the film director, Minanto.

Click here for more information, and photos from the event.

“Conceptualization of Change" screenings at PAF Olomouc

"Conceptualization of Change" by Kristýna Kopřivová, Nico Carpentier, and Vaia Doudaki was screened in scope of PAF Olomouc 2022, the 21st Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, which took place in Olomouc, Czech Republic, during 1–4 December 2022. The film was screened as part of the Other Visions CZ ’21 screenings, scheduled for December 2. The film was also screened earlier on 12 November 2022, in scope of Studio Performance Art (SPA) PerformanceBus event in Prague-Opava, as part of Other Visions CZ ‘21.

Read more about the screening and the film here.

New Video: Urban Bird

”Urban Bird” is a video by visual artist Soraya Poulin about her residency project developed during Mistra-EC’s artist-in-residence (AiR) program in Prague (September-October 2022), in collaboration with Mistra-EC researchers at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at Charles University. The project explores the relationship between humans and nature in the city, and their various power dynamics, through a collage of paintings, photography and drawings.

Click here to watch the full video.

Environmental Ideologies Map: An interactive website project developed by the MISTRA Environmental Communication Research Programme

In 2023, Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta, as a post-doc researcher of the MEC@ICSJ team will develop the Environmental Ideologies, a website publication project that aims to creatively communicate an earlier designed map of competing ideological projects over the environment, sustainability, and, more generally, human-nature relationships. The website will offer a visualization of the map of interconnected clusters of ideologies to offer an interactive experience to users who can navigate clusters of meanings over nature, sustainability, and climate change through textual and audio-visual content produced with the contribution of authoritative voices from the field of environmental humanities and communication explaining each ideological component of the map. The interactive website will visually and interactively support the WP5’s work, exploring how nature is ideologically articulated in the current societal debates both globally and in the Swedish context.

What is your Wolf Talk?

Reflections on “Silencing/Unsilencing Nature: the media and arts-based research sound- and image installation Wolf Talks” that was displayed in Uppsala, Sweden during 24 October-5 November 2022. Written by Elisabeth Wennerström, former Erasmus+ Trainee at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at Charles University, Prague, working on the Wolf Talks project.

Read more

New Presentations/Talks

FILIMONOV, KIRILL, CARPENTIER, NICO (2023) Can the material speak? Nature as an object and subject of discursive regulation in a Swedish TV documentary, Discourse Theory: Ways Forward, 2nd Edition, Brussels, Belgium (23-24 March 2023).

CARPENTIER, NICO (2023) Guest lecture, Multimodal Projects in Communication and Media Studies: Creation, Exhibition and Publication, Department of Mass Communication, Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan. (16 February 2023).

CARPENTIER, NICO (2023) To look into the eyes of the non-human other: The Wolf Talks arts-based research intervention, “The art of thinking like a mountain”: Empathy for nature and non-human beings Seminar, Department of Fine Arts, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus. (28 January 2023).

You can view the presentations and talks made by WP5 researchers here.

New Online Texts

Algorithmically Embodied Emissions by Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl. Published in Data & Society: Points on 28 February 2023.

Internet search results could be increasing your carbon emissions by Malte Rödl and Jutta Haider. Published in The Conversation on 7 December 2022.

A quest for a magnetic stone by Coralie Gourguechon, resident artist for the AiR@SLU in Uppsala.

Urban Bird: Non-human-centered visualisations of human-nature relationships in the city by Soraya Poulin, resident artist for the AiR@CU in Prague.

You can view the online texts written as part of WP5 research and collaborations here.