Special issue of Media Business Culture journal, to be published Dec. 2024.
Issue editor: Bartłomiej Łódzki
We invite experts from various fields to submit original, as yet unpublished articles in English or Polish on topics related to the interdisciplinary field of environmental communication research. We are looking for innovative papers focusing on threats, challenges, and opportunities that will enrich the scientific exchange of ideas and contribute to the dynamically developing research around environmental communication.
Articles of 20,000-30,000 characters (including spaces) should be submitted by 01 Oct. 2024 to bartlomiej.lodzki@uwr.edu.pl. The submitted texts should follow journal instructions for authors: https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/media-biznes-kultura/page/instructions-for-authors
Description of the issue
As a research field in communication sciences and beyond its boundaries, environmental communication originally developed in North America and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. In the following decades, there was a clear process of its global spread. Currently, it stands out for its interdisciplinarity and analysis of phenomena both locally and globally.
Environmental communication covers more than just climate change issues. It is primarily concerned with raising awareness, educating the public and motivating action on environmental issues such as pollution, biodiversity, natural resource management and sustainable development. It is closely related to scientific communication. However, it involves not only scientists but also industry practitioners and society. It is a central element of political legislation, electoral and information campaigns. It is the core of the activities of selected government and non-profit organizations and commercial institutions. Implementing environmental communication is visible in the activities of politicians, the media, businesses, and broadly understood culture.
Climate change and environmental problems affect almost every area of life. The effects of rapid environmental changes bring with them social, economic and political problems. They pose multidimensional challenges. Deficiencies or neglect can have multi-generational consequences.
Research problems
In the special issue of Media Business Culture titled “Environmental communication - threats, challenges and opportunities”, we propose to focus on the following research problems and topics, which make an open-ended list rather than any ultimate delimitation of possible perspectives:
1. How does media shape how people view environmental issues, and how does it report on these subjects? What are the main interpretative approaches used?
2. How does social media and digital platforms influence promoting or impeding communication about the environment?
3. How do cultural and social factors affect how environmental messages are received and understood?
4. What are the strategies to enhance public participation in environmental policymaking through better communication?
5. Who should be responsible for crafting environmental messages that can effectively drive changes in behaviour and attitudes, and how can this be done? How can we improve the communication of environmental risks to ensure people understand and take action?
6. How can we tailor environmental communication to respect cultural differences and remain effective in various international settings?
7. What are the most effective ways to communicate about climate change, considering both the scepticism and the urgent need for action?
8. How do businesses communicate their environmental strategies to their stakeholders, and what effect does this communication have?
9. How can interdisciplinary approaches enhance the understanding and impact of communication on environmental topics?
10. What role do scientists have in relaying environmental issues?
11. What are the most effective techniques for gauging the influence of environmental communication on awareness and behaviour modification?
More about different perspectives of environmental communication
Akerlof, K., Timm, K., Rowan, K., Olds, J., & Hathaway, J. (2022). The Growth and Disciplinary Convergence of Environmental Communication: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Field (1970–2019). , 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2021.814599.
Anderson, A. (2015). Reflections on Environmental Communication and the Challenges of a New Research Agenda. Environmental Communication, 9, 379 - 383. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2015.1044063.
Balcı, E., Duğan, Ö., & Cavas, B. (2023). Twenty-Two Years Of Science Communication Research: A Bibliometric Analysis. Journal of Baltic Science Education. https://doi.org/10.33225/jbse/23.22.393.
Comfort, S., & Park, Y. (2018). On the Field of Environmental Communication: A Systematic Review of the Peer-Reviewed Literature. Environmental Communication, 12, 862 - 875. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1514315.
Cram, E., Law, M.P., & Pezzullo, P.C. (2022). Cripping Environmental Communication: A Review of Eco-Ableism, Eco-Normativity, and Climate Justice Futurities. Environmental Communication, 16, 851 - 863.
Depoe, S. (2007). Environmental Communication as Nexus. Environmental Communication, 1, 1 - 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524030701395871.
Guidotti, T. (2013). Communication Models in Environmental Health. Journal of Health Communication, 18, 1166 - 1179. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2013.768725.
Hansen, A. (2011). Communication, media and environment: Towards reconnecting research on the production, content and social implications of environmental communication. International Communication Gazette, 73, 25 - 7. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048510386739.
House, C., Jordan, N. L., Butt, T. E., Kwan, J., & Alam, A. (2018). Perception Versus Skepticism—An Environmental Communication Issue and Climate Change. In W. L. Filho (Ed.), Handbook of Sustainability Science and Research (pp. 893-901). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63007-6_54
Łódzki, B. (2023). Media jako jeden z czynników wpływających na zaufanie do wyników badań naukowych w kontekście zmian klimatu. Zeszyty Prasoznawcze, 2023, 47-59. doi:https://doi.org/10.4467/22996362PZ.23.015.17979
Mastria, S., Vezzil, A., & Cesarei, A. (2023). Going Green: A Review on the Role of Motivation in Sustainable Behavior. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.3390/su152115429.
Merkel, S., Person, A., Peppler, R., & Melcher, S. (2020). Climate Change Communication: Examining the Social and Cognitive Barriers to Productive Environmental Communication. Social Science Quarterly, 101, 2085-2100. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12843.
Suriyanarayanan, S. and Charoensudjai, P. (2021). Environmental issues and sustainable development.. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.87467
Issue editors: Halszka Leleń and Monika Przybysz
We invite scholars of various disciplines to submit original and hitherto unpublished articles in English or in Polish on the topics related to (but not limited to) some aspects mentioned below.
Articles of 20 000-40 000 characters (including spaces) should be submitted by 01 Oct. 2022 to halszka.lelen@uwm.edu.pland/or m.przybysz@uksw.edu.pl. The submitted texts should follow journal instructions for authors: https://www.ejournals.eu/MBK/menu/788/
Studies of the narratives' reception and the applications of narrative theory to various fields of human activity can be found in many scholarly disciplines while the knowledge on the specifics of the narrative patterns in audio-visual advertisements is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the scarcity of theoretical works devoted to this field. Nevertheless, the narrative aspects of advertising seem to be a crucial theme to explore as the story patterns are indispensable to communicate any commercial message in the growing body of advertising forms in various media such as internet, tv and radio as well as ambient media. The function of narration in these communicative practices is multiple and can be named as, for example: reaching some understanding with the addressee, prompting recognition of intertextual games, stimulating interpretation convergent with the goals adopted by the advertiser, encouraging agreement for the revealed system of judgments and inspiring valorization corresponding to the intentions of persuasive communicates.
The characteristic feature of contemporary advertising communicates is involving the addressee in the narrative world that is deliberately construed so as to evoke changes in attitudes, with some narrative patterns stemming from common transmitter-receiver socio-cultural experiences. The exploration of these paradigms is a challenging task for a researcher due to abundance and multiplicity of meanings ascribed to narration. The scholar has to take into account the complexity and diversity of considered phenomena, while applying interdisciplinary knowledge and combining diverse scholarly perspectives. Considering the aforementioned issues as inspiring for people representing various theoretical disciplines, we invite media studies specialists, linguists, literary scholars, anthropologists, culture studies experts, sociologists and economists as well as representatives of design theory and scholars specialized in visual communication.
In the special issue of Media Business Culture titled Narrative in Advertising, we propose to focus on the following subject areas, which make an open-end list rather than any ultimate delimitation of possible perspectives:
The signaled scholarly problems indicate that research done in the field of advertising should not be limited to one chosen theoretical paradigm,but it has to be broadened by the knowledge derived from many research perspectives. Therefore, we invite you to contribute to the thematic issue, hoping for the publication of interdisciplinary studies that might explore diverse facets of the narrative paradigms of advertising and discuss the key conditions of their functioning.
Inspirational Readings:
Berger A.A., Narratives in Popular Culture, Media, and Everyday Life, Sage, London 1997.
Bergström B., Essentials of Visual Communication, Laurence King Publishing, London 2009.
Bianchi C., Semiotic Approaches to Advertising Texts and Strategies: Narrative, Passion, Marketing, “Semiotica” 2011, nr 183 (1/4), pp. 243-272.
Cook G., The Discourse of Advertising, Routledge, New York, NY 2003, (Work first published 1992)
Herman D., Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2013.
Kim E.A., Shoenberger H., Kwon E.P., Ratneshwar S., A Narrative Approach for Overcoming the Message Credibility Problem in Green Advertising, “Journal of Business Research” 2022, nr 147, pp 449-461.
NöthW. Advertising [in:] Handbook of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 1995, pp. 476-480.
Odih P., Advertising in Modern and Postmodern Times, SAGE, London 2007.
Propp V., Morphology of the Folktale, ed. L. A. Wagner, trans. L. Scott, 2nd ed., University of Texas Press, Austin, TE, 1968. (Original work published 1928)
Narrative Across the Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. M.-L. Ryan,Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, NE 2004.
vanDijck J., Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2007.
Handbook of Research on Narrative Advertising, ed. R. Yilmaz,IGI Global, 2019.
Zaltman G., How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA 2003.
Editorial team:
prof. dr hab. Alicja Jaskiernia
dr hab. Katarzyna Gajlewicz-Korab
Description of the issue
The theme of the issues is the dynamic acceleration of changes in the media and communication sectors, driven by digital technologies that have radically influenced all areas of human life: work, politics, economy, culture, access to information and knowledge.
At the beginning of 2020, an additional factor of change emerged - the COVID-19 pandemic. This classic "gray swan" turned the already unstable world of the 21st century, with which "something was wrong" already, which was stated by Ms. Olga Tokarczuk in her famous Nobel Prize lecture in December 2019.
The shocking dystopian fiction of the future, which were often messages and pictures from movies or media images from the past, suddenly turned out to be our present day. The new book of the famous political scientist Ivan Krastev is titled "Tomorrow has come. How a pandemic changes Europe ", the philosopher Slavoj Žižek responded to the pandemic with an expressive synthesis of our present in his book" Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World”.
Both authors make one diagnosis: the future, which is the result of the fourth digital industrial revolution, which seemed to be on the threshold, has just entered our lives, is shocking the world and we should not expect a return "to the past".
We propose to refer to this vision in the context of the media. What new "order" is emerging from the digital age, which was supposed to democratize communication media production processes, break down barriers to access to information and knowledge?
In this “new order”, governed by chaotic attempts to keep up with the waves of change (convergence, internetisation, platformization), media and the media industry attempt to develop some new kind of strategy of viability and coordination, sometimes with support from the governments and organizations, new ways of global coordination.
So we ask the following questions: How does the global communication system, described aptly by Manuel Castells as a network society, change nowadays? What kind of picture of the media ecosystem, in the era of accelerated digital revolution, emerges from the pieces that we are able to describe, denominate and to determine their place in a larger whole?
Research problems
§ The fourth industrial revolution and the media, culture and communication sector
§ The strategic role of information in social crises (including health crises)
§ The key changes the pandemic has caused in the global information order
§ Global shifts in the contemporary balance of power and the impact on cultural industries
§ Does the "network order" invalidate Wallerstein's theory of roles of the centers and peripheries? Are we dealing with a “cultural revolt” of the peripheries?
§ Old and new cultural production centers. A game for a place in the global market
§ The role of the Silicon Valley companies and other technological hubs in the communication sector
§ GAFA or where does the big money flow go in the media and culture sectors?
Media Business Culture. Journalism and social communication; https://www.ejournals.eu/MBK/
Submission for papers for „Media-Biznes-Kultura” : redakcjambk@ug.edu.pl; impilia@poczta.onet.pl; a.jaskier@gmail.com; k.gajlewicz@uw.edu.pl
Instructions for Authors: https://www.ejournals.eu/MBK/menu/788/