Climate Conversations: Discursive Strategies of Climate Justice Organizing

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This award was provided as part of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Corrie Grosse at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining discursive strategies of climate justice organizing. Previous research on climate change communication has largely focused on non-interactive, monologic texts that aim to inform or persuade audiences, rather than on interactive, dialogic conversations about climate change. However, many grassroots climate communicators and organizations currently see such climate conversations as essential for shifting attitudes and inspiring action. The proposed study applies an interactional sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of climate conversations, with the aim of identifying effective discursive strategies for advancing climate justice within and across specific sociocultural contexts in the United States.Through a participatory research framework that combines survey, interview, and discourse-analytic methods, the study will (a) examine how grassroots climate communicators employ climate conversations in their organizing and (b) identify characteristics of successful climate conversations, determining success through pre- and post-surveys of conversational participants’ climate-related actions and views. Through fine-grained analysis of interactional language use, this analysis will shed light on how slow-moving, intersectional crises such as climate change are managed in discourse. By prioritizing participation by marginalized climate justice organizers, such as Black and Indigenous organizers, this project will help to remedy the underrepresentation of these voices in previous research. The analysis of successful climate conversations will empower climate communicators to hone effective communicative strategies guided by scientific inquiry, helping to address the problem of low perceived efficacy, which has emerged as a barrier to climate action. Finally, the project will generate a corpus of climate conversations that will be of use to other researchers and climate change communication practitioners.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.