Climate Conversations: Discursive Strategies of Climate Justice Organizing

该奖项是NSF社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界，工业或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF的奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。NSF致力于促进来自科学界各部门的科学家，包括来自代表性不足的群体的科学家参与其研究计划和活动;博士后期间被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的重要水平。每个博士后研究员必须解决推进各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在圣本笃学院和圣约翰大学的科里格罗斯博士的赞助下，这个博士后奖学金支持一个早期的职业科学家研究气候正义组织的话语策略。以往关于气候变化传播的研究主要集中在非互动性的、旨在告知或说服受众的独白式文本上，而不是关于气候变化的互动性对话。然而，许多基层气候传播者和组织目前认为这种气候对话对于转变态度和激励行动至关重要。该研究采用了一种跨文化社会语言学方法来分析气候对话，旨在确定有效的话语策略，以促进美国特定社会文化背景下的气候正义。通过一个结合调查，访谈和话语分析方法的参与性研究框架，该研究将（a）检查基层气候传播者如何在组织中使用气候对话，（B）确定成功气候对话的特征，通过对对话参与者的气候相关行动和观点进行事前和事后调查来确定成功与否。通过对中介语使用的细粒度分析，这种分析将揭示如何在话语中处理气候变化等缓慢的交叉危机。通过优先考虑被边缘化的气候正义组织者，如黑人和土著组织者的参与，该项目将有助于弥补这些声音在以前的研究中代表性不足的问题。对成功的气候对话的分析将使气候传播者能够在科学探究的指导下磨练有效的传播策略，帮助解决感知效率低的问题，这已经成为气候行动的障碍。最后，该项目将产生一个气候对话语料库，将用于其他研究人员和气候变化传播从业人员。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.