British Science Festival, Birmingham, 14 September, 2010. Brigitte Nerlich and Mick Blowfield (Oxford) will be discussants after Mike Hulme’s (UEA) paper: “Why We Disagree About Climate Change: exploring complexity, plurality and opportunity”.
Brigitte Nerlich, 20 - 22nd July 2010, 2-Day Workshop ‘Climate Change Perceptions, Risk Communication and Public Engagement’ funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, University of Cardiff, UK.
Brigitte Nerlich, 18 and 19 November 2010, paper entitled ‘Low Carbon Metals, Markets and Metaphors: The Creation of Economic Expectations about Climate Change Mitigation’. COMMUNICATING GREEN conference, (Organizational Communication and Environment, Evolution of Approaches and Change of Practices), Brussels, Belgium.
Nelya Koteyko, 18 and 19 November 2010, paper entitled ‘The rise and rise of corporate carbon: a linguistic enquiry into ‘market driven sustainability’. COMMUNICATING GREEN conference, (Organizational Communication and Environment, Evolution of Approaches and Change of Practices), Brussels, Belgium.
Brigitte Nerlich, 7 May 2010, paper entitled ‘Low Carbon Metals, Markets and Metaphors: The Creation of Economic Expectations about Climate Change Mitigation’. For: Language, Communication, and the Ecological Crisis – The 20th DGH Annual Conference Focuses on Environmental Communication, Sommerhausen am Main, Germany.
Nelya Koteyko, 17 February 2010 – attended the Mixed Methods Seminar: Transforming, Triangulating and Quantitising Data – How CAQDAS supports Data Integration at the University of Surrey.
Nelya Koteyko, 8 February 2010 – attended the workshop ‘Finishing the Copenhagen Business: Why the involvement of Central and Eastern Europe is Crucial?’ organised by the Hungarian Embassy in London, in association with the Regional Environmental Centre.
Brigitte Nerlich, 12 November 2009, paper entitled: ‘Carbon Capture and Storage – are we missing opportunities for public engagement?’ For: CICCS Annual one day conference: Innovations for a cleaner future, Trent Building, University of Nottingham, organised by the Centre for Innovation in Carbon Capture and Storage, University of Nottingham
Brigitte Nerlich: Presentation by senior academics on the occasion of Jock Wittlesey's visit to the University of Nottingham, 18 September 2009. Jock Wittelsey is Environment Counselor, US Embassy, London
Brigitte Nerlich: Keynote lecture for international conference on "Communication, Cognition and Media" at The Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Portugal Braga (near Oporto) 22-24 September 2009; http://www.cicom2009.org
Nelya Koteyko: 16-18 July 2009, ‘Web as Culture: ethnographic, linguistic & didactic perspectives’ conference, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.
Mining the web for linguistic and socio-cultural information: the case of ‘carbon compounds’ in climate change discourse.
Nelya Koteyko and Brigitte Nerlich: 1st International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, CILC-09, 7-9 May, 2009, University of Murcia, Spain.
The use of metaphorical compounds on the web: corpus construction and preliminary analysis
Abstract
The paper discusses how ad hoc corpora compiled with the help of Altavista search engine can be employed to study the coinage and use of novel compounds headed by the noun ‘carbon’ on the internet. We compiled a corpus from Altavista abstracts and URLs to explore the role of some of these 'carbon compounds' as framing devices in different online discourses dealing with issues of climate change mitigation. By combining a quantitative diachronic analysis of their occurrences with a qualitative analysis of the contexts in which the compounds were used, we identify three clusters of compounds focused on finance, lifestyle, and attitudes, and then elucidate the different communicative purposes to which they were put between the 1990s and the early 21st century. This approach may open up new ways for a web based diachronic study of novel word combinations and the social and cultural implications of their use.
Brigitte Nerlich: 18 April 2009, BSA Annual Conference 2009: The Challenge of Global Social Enquiry 2009, Cardiff, UK.
Creativity, complexity and ‘carbon compounds’: Tracing the meaning of climate change in the English media
Abstract
Climate scientists and social scientists are grappling with complex and dynamic feedback mechanisms that operate between economy, society and the ecosystem. Language is part of this dynamic system and has developed a dynamics of its own with relation to climate change. Whereas the 20th century was the century of ‘the gene’ whose meaning has been studied by many social scientists and STS scholars (e.g. Condit, 1999; Keller, 2000 and many more), the 21st century will be the century of ‘carbon’ whose meaning still needs to be studied, preferably before we enter the era of ‘a post-carbon society’. There is what one may call an explosion of information around climate change. Advice on how to reduce one’s ‘carbon footprint’ is provided almost daily in newspapers, adverts, books, and on websites. This explosion of information is mirrored by the explosion of creativity around ‘carbon’, as much of this advice is framed by using ‘carbon compounds’ - lexical combinations of at least two roots - such as ‘carbon finance’, ‘carbon sinner’, or ‘low carbon diet’. These are only some of the numerous discursive and metaphorical clusters that have emerged recently around 'carbon' as the hub. A whole new language is evolving that needs to be monitored and investigated in order to discover how climate change is framed by various stakeholders, how public attitudes and perceptions are shaped and what solutions to climate change and global warming are proposed.
This paper will report on a project that tracks the emergence and proliferation of carbon compounds in traditional media and in blogs. It will contribute new empirical data to the social study of climate change and contribute new methods, such as corpus linguistics and cybermetrics, to the social study of public controversies. The overall aim is to construct a (rough) ‘conceptual map’ of the linguistic landscape on which the battle for climate change communication is being fought, indicating sign-posts marking sites of major communicational conflicts and contestation.
Brigitte Nerlich: 7 April, 2009, Researching Environmental Change: Workshop exploring the contribution of arts and humanities research, Royal Horticultural Society Conference Centre in London. This one-day workshop is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, working through two AHRC-funded funding initiatives - the Landscape and <https://owa.nottingham.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.landscape.ac.uk/> Environment Programme and the Science <https://owa.nottingham.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.heritagescience.ac.uk/> and Heritage Programme.
Brigitte Nerlich and Nelya Koteyko: Engaging the public in climate change and energy demand reduction
7-8 October 2008, St Hugh's College, Oxford
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/Downloads/PDF/Meeting%20Place/Events/2008/10CommDemand/programmV6.pdfPaper by Brigitte Nerlich
Climate change and collective creativity: Why communicating a message may not be enough
Abstract
First a disclaimer: I am not a climate communication expert. I hope to become one over the next two years when carrying out an ESRC funded project focusing on one aspect of climate change language, namely the use of what we have called ‘carbon compounds’, such as carbon footprint, carbon tax and so on. I will start my talk with a gentle deconstruction of the task we have been given, that is, to find an answer to the question: ‘What should we communicate to the public about climate change and energy reduction’. After this relatively negative opening, I shall turn to the more positive side of climate change and its ability to ‘feed creativity’. I will focus on lexical creativity around ‘carbon compounds’ and study this with relation to the language use and media coverage of ‘carbon rationing action groups’. I will conclude with some results pointing to the importance of social, linguistic and cognitive processes at work and pose the question whether communication is enough to get people ‘engaged’ with issues of climate change. We have to tap into collective creative processes but also provide more mundane tools that allow people to ‘carbon count’ more efficiently.
The Agile Mind: Creativity in Discourse and Art
Brussels, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (VLAC)
Brussels, 11-12 September 2008
‘Carbon compounds’: Lexical creativity in the context of climate change (Report on a case study)
Paper by Brigitte Nerlich
Abstract: In English speaking countries the ongoing debates on climate change and global warming have spawned lexical developments around the noun 'carbon' as the hub. A whole new language is evolving around the term 'carbon' that needs to be monitored and investigated, especially with regard to what one may call an emerging ‘carbon-ethics’: we find that there are 'carbon criminals', 'carbon champions', and 'carbon critics'; 'carbon profligacy' is admonished and people worry about their ‘carbon footprints’ and more recently an impending ‘carbon credit crunch’. These are just some of the creative lexical combinations that are being used in the UK media. In a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, we want to chart this process of lexical creativity from about the 1990s onwards, when compounds, such as 'carbon neutral', 'carbon tax', and ‘carbon trading', started to creep into the English language on the tail of ‘carbon dioxide’ and 'carbon emissions'. We also aim to examine how such compounds are used in debates about climate change by various stakeholders, in what arguments they are embedded, what entailments they have and what actions they call for. This presentation will focus on a small case study and investigate the creative language used to talk about energy reduction activities in recently established ‘Carbon Rationing Action Groups’. The paper compares and contrasts language use on the their website and in a corpus of newspaper articles reporting on them, using a combination of tools from frame analysis, lexical pragmatics and metaphor analysis within the general framework of ‘ecolinguistics’. It aims to contribute to our understanding of how the meanings of climate change are linguistically and creatively shaped and constructed, and to shed light on the relationship between discourses, linguistic frames and social practices.
AILA World Congress, August 24-29 2008, Essen, Germany
Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée or International Association of Applied Linguistics.
http://www.aila2008.org/public/pdf-dokumente-aila/monday_schedule_website7.pdf
Symposium, Monday, 25 August, 2008
Language and Ecology: An ecological perspective on the interplay between language and the environment
Thematic strand: Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Stylistics
Organised by Richard Alexander (Vienna)
Paper by Brigitte Nerlich
Title: Carbon reduction activism in the UK: Lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change