Practicing Care Through Creative and Collaborative Climate Communication

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a critical reflection upon the reimagining of environmental and climate communication as a discipline of care, through the practices of creative and collaborative climate communication. Drawing upon my experiences of working on creative climate communication projects with young people in the UK and Europe, I explore how collaborative practice can foreground care as a constitutive dimension of our discipline(s) through its focus upon relationality, interconnectedness, and collectivity. A focus upon care as an ethic of enquiry and mode of practice can also reorient the constitutive purpose of our discipline(s), helping us to productively question the individual and collective work we do, how we undertake this work and with whom, and whose voices and perspectives we seek and thus prioritize.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate communication
• creative climate
• collaborative practice
• climate care

To care involves emotion, thought and action. To care is to imagine, feel or experience relational connections to/with another/others. To care is to take responsibility for those connections and to put them in/to practice. To care is to be attentive and reflexive. To care and do caring is shaped and impacted by gender, race, class, sexuality, age, dis/ability, and other power relations. To care and do caring shifts the temporal focus onto the active present. To care and do caring is necessary but/and hard work.

Phaedra Pezzullo's (2024) call to resituate and reimagine environmental communication as a discipline of care as much as it is one of crisis is a compelling reframing of the purpose of our work and an assertion of where we should be collectively heading. Communication shapes how we imagine, think and act – it is constitutive and it is praxis (Cox, 2007; Pezzullo & Cox, 2021). “Crisis” communicates an ever present and intense danger or threat that requires immediate response. Yet such immediacy can forge short term and technocratic responses that further entrench inequalities. As Pezzullo (2024) notes, this simultaneously reinforces despair and burnout for those involved in environmental scholarship-practice-activism, as we seek to continuously respond – over many years – to this ever present and imminent threat. Rethinking environmental and climate communication as a form of “care” communicatively shifts the temporal and epistemological perspective to one of active presence, relationality, interconnectedness, responsibility, equality, collectivity, and even hope.

A shift to care does not deny the urgent realities of ecological crises. Instead, it more consciously asserts a way of responding with care to these crises, providing pathways for envisioning more equitable and just societies. A shift to care renders more visible the uncaring capitalist-colonialist-extractivist social and economic systems that have caused, and continue to exacerbate, these crises (Malik, 2019; Sultana, 2021), including corporations’ co-option of climate care (Doyle et al., 2020). A focus upon care helps reorient the purpose of our discipline to address the ongoing silences and oversights across race, sexuality, disability, age, class, and culture most explicitly, that continue to inform the limits of our individual and collective work (Cram et al., 2022). Pezzullo's commitment to addressing these through the work of this journal under her Editorship will necessarily require some of us to step back, to be silent, to be more vocal, and to seek collaborations with care and respect that will shift our own perspectives and choices of environmental scholarship and practice. As a white, queer, able-bodied, (now) middle-class, cis-woman from the global north, my experiences shape my perspectives in both productive and limiting ways. Like the founding basis of our discipline, what we choose to examine and engage with through our work, whose voices and perspectives we seek and thus prioritize, are constitutive of environmental communication as a field of research and practice. Doing this reflexive collective work with care will make us a more equitable, purposeful and just field of enquiry and practice.

Shifting communication perspectives – creative and collaborative climate communication

I appreciate and value the opportunity to take this moment to reflect upon our discipline(s) through the lens of care and to consider its relationship to my own work. As someone who has contributed to this interdisciplinary field for nearly 20 years, and who originally came to it through their experiences of communicative protest within mainstream environmental activism in the UK, I am sure that care about/for environment/s has been the primary motivation for most of our contributions to this field over the years. Yet, thinking of care more specifically as a theoretical, methodological, empirical, and strategic mode of enquiry for environmental communication takes this ethical commitment into the constitutive dimensions of our field – it forces us to think, with care and more carefully, about the topics of our critical enquiries, the ways that we work, who we work with and support, and the broader institutional and societal dynamics that influence these decisions and practices, which too often remain invisible or unspoken. As such, care becomes both an ethic of enquiry and a mode of practice.

In the last decade, my individual scholarship on the communication of climate change across media, visual and popular culture, arts, activism, and science, has shifted and expanded to encompass how climate's communicative meaning-making can be explored and challenged through different creative communication practices in collaboration with artists (System Change Hive, 2019),¹ school children (Doyle, 2020)² and young adults (Cli-Mates, 2017).³ I made a conscious decision to reorient my scholarly work to collaborative practice and climate learning/education. Whilst I feel more at “home” analyzing visual and textual forms of climate communication, and continue to do such work, I also felt/feel some of the limitations of critical scholarly work, which, whilst offering (important and necessary) critiques of the communicative dimensions of climate change, often remains within the confines of the academy, rather than applied and interrogated through practice. Such work necessarily involves collaborating with people outside the academy and from diverse communities. Such processes take time and care to forge and develop.

In 2009, I began my collaborative climate communication journey through a Leverhulme Trust funded Artist-in-Residence project⁴ with the UK artist, David Harradine, from Fevered Sleep performance company (Fevered Sleep, 2023a). Using the visual media of film, our proposition was to challenge climate impacts and polar bear imagery that dominated mainstream UK and global media coverage at the time (O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009), and to explore how climate communication scholarship could inform creative practice and vice versa. Through conversations that brought our scholarly and artistic perspectives together, we navigated a conceptual and visual framework that sought to question binary distinctions between humans-animals, nature-culture, and bring climate change from the future-oriented into the embodied present. As part of the collaborative process, we produced a manifesto that playfully encompassed our different critical and esthetic aims (Doyle, 2011).

The resulting multi-platform film and phone app created by Fevered Sleep was called It's the Skin You are Living In (Fevered Sleep, 2023b). Rather than discarding the problematic image of the polar bear (Tam et al., 2021), the artist, David Harradine, chose to use this climate icon to question species and nature-culture binaries, and to resituate climate in the embodied human present (Figure 1). As such, the human-animal polar bear went on a visual journey from Svalbard in the Arctic to the Scottish Hebrides, through a dairy farm, alongside a British motorway, then finishing in a house in London where the polar bear skin was fully discarded to reveal the human. Screened and circulated outside of the academy, the film become part of the rapidly developing work in arts and cultural engagements with climate change in the early 2010s, particularly since COP15 in Copenhagen, 2009. The film showed me that working creatively with others on climate communication issues can create new forms of imagery that contribute more imaginative and affective responses and which simultaneously call attention to – and render visible in different ways – those communicative challenges identified by scholarship.

Figure 1. Still image from It's the Skin You are Living In (Fevered Sleep 2011–2013). ©Fevered Sleep.

If we rethink environmental communication as a discipline of care, then we must think carefully about the communities we work with and whose voices are sought, a key aspect of climate justice. Whilst creative climate communication research was nascent 10 years ago (the University of Colorado Boulder's “Inside the Greenhouse” is an early example), so was climate communication research with young people. Addressing this gap, in 2015, I began a collaborative creative climate communication project with ONCA art charity (UK), and teenagers from a local high school. Premised on Ken Eklund's participatory digital storytelling game, “FutureCoast,” that invited online players to create voicemails from the future (FutureCoast, 2014), our project, “FutureCoast Youth,” utilized this creative speculative approach to work with a small group of British high school students (aged 14–15 years) to create their own voicemails from the future (Figure 2) and, subsequently, their own climate communication. The aim was to center their perspectives on climate change through an interdisciplinary and multidimensional learning process that fostered sociocultural understandings of climate change and increase their self-efficacy (Doyle, 2020).

Figure 2. FutureCoast Youth members making voicemails from the future ©ONCA.

Facer (2019) has called for education where young people can “make, tell and listen to stories” (3) to enable them to contribute on their own terms to the imagining and making of liveable futures. Whilst the FutureCoast Youth project illustrated how participatory play and speculative storytelling with students helped their sociocultural understandings of climate change, and increased their confidence and climate efficacy, more educational work needs to be done to shift futures thinking from techno-managerial solutions to more relational care (Doyle, 2020). Through our understanding of communication as constitutive praxis, the discipline(s) of environmental and climate communication can contribute immensely here, working with educators and young people to move beyond the crisis of imagination that renders apocalyptic visions central, toward more caring, affective and interconnected visions of future societies in the present.

The global youth climate strikes and emerging movement have shown how deeply young people care about their futures, and their strategic use of communication to express this (Eide & Kunelius, 2021; Feldman, 2020;). Whilst much of this communication has been framed through science-driven politics (Marquardt, 2020) that can reproduce apocalyptic visions, when young people are supported in becoming involved in their own climate communication projects, more complex and radical solutions are offered (Kowasch et al., 2021). Indeed, British youth are calling for education that teaches climate change and climate justice across the curriculum, beyond science (Teach the Future, 2023).

Addressing the need for interdisciplinary youth climate learning, in 2017, I collaborated on a youth climate engagement project that explored how co-created climate communication could facilitate young people's climate efficacy (Cli-Mates, 2017). The project centered upon a retreat in St Gilgen, Austria in 2018. Here, 20 young adults (21-29 years old) from across Europe came together to co-create their own climate communication through a multidimensional learning experience mixing expert communication and scientific inputs with peer-to-peer learning. The retreat was co-devised by the project team, comprised of climate communication and science scholars, creative arts practitioners and facilitators, media communication consultants and environmental impact assessment experts. Underpinned by transformational learning principles (Sterling et al., 2018), the retreat situated climate communication as a form of cultural meaning-making and communicative action. Examples of climate communication included personal climate storytelling by the young adults, sharing of communication research from the project team, group analysis of existing climate communication examples, co-creation of climate communication principles, and the young people's co-created climate campaign ideas. The end goal was for the young adults to create their own climate communication projects.

I was not prepared for the depths of feeling and care that the young adults felt about climate change, expressed through a facilitated group experience of Joanna Macy's “Truth circle” (Macy, 1998) during the retreat. The young adults shared deep feelings of anger, despair and sorrow around the impacts of climate change, the lack of global action, and how this affected their life decisions about what kinds of work they would do. Some had already experienced burnout from frontline climate activism. The reflexive and emotionally supportive space the retreat provided, enabled this sharing of grief and despair across all of the participants and project team. These emotional connections forged a collective identity for the young adults, who named themselves the “St Gilgen Climate Collective” (Figure 3). Today, I can share that the bonds formed during this time/space continued beyond the retreat.

Figure 3. “St Gilgen Climate Collective,” Austria, 2018.©Cli-Mates.

Supporting emotional sharing about climate change, particularly within a research/educational context, takes sensitivity and care. Collaborating with experienced facilitators is important here, as well as being open to sharing our own feelings as part of that transformational learning process. Yet crisis doesn't necessarily allow time for such sharing, reflection or collaborative acts of care. Shifting our disciplinary attention to care would support this, with an attendant focus upon finding hope, joy and repair in the work that we do as an important part of those caring processes.

Working through/with care

Working with others requires care. Care in finding collaborators and partners. Care in creating trust as an ongoing process. Care thus also takes time. Time to build those relations. Time to agree the research goals and parameters. Time to apply for funding. Time to reflect upon the research findings, to write, to review, to rewrite. In the product/output-oriented institutional context of academia, those slower more careful ways of working are not always supported by such institutional constraints, or the differential allocations of research time in our workloads that vary within and across universities. For those of us working part-time for caring or health reasons, time restrictions are even tighter. The period in which I have worked collaboratively, as described above, coincides with the time that I became a parent to children with disabilities, a part-time worker, and a carer of elderly parents. And I also experienced burnout. All of these circumstances affect my productivity levels. Yet, I value the interactions, learnings and challenges of working collaboratively as part of environmental communication praxis. I also crave quiet space for reflection and repair. If our discipline is to move strategically from one solely animated by crisis to one centering care, then a wholistic approach to undertaking the work that we (choose to) do and with whom, the societal and institutional conditions that enable and constrain these, and how we support ourselves and each other in the process, should be the constitutive basis from which we work. By situating care as an ethic of environmental enquiry and mode of practice for our discipline(s) we thus help create the conditions needed for the reimagining and creation of more equitable, just and liveable futures, in the present.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts Council England; Leverhulme Trust; and Austrian Climate Research Programme.

Notes

1 Funded by Arts Council Grants for the Arts (ACE). Project title: The System Change Hive. January 2019–June 2020. PI: Swarm Dynamics. Co-PIs: Julie Doyle, University of Brighton; ESRC STEPS Centre, University of Sussex. All participants gave informed consent.

2 Funded by Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP) Seed Fund Award, University of Brighton. Project title: FutureCoast Youth: Creative Collaborations for a Changing Climate. With ONCA Arts Charity and Dorothy Stringer High School (UK). The research was given ethical approval by the University of Brighton and all participants and parents/guardians gave informed consent.

3 Funded by Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP). Project title: Cli-Mates – exploring the role of social norms, self and group efficacy for mainstreaming climate action among young adults. April 2017–April 2019. PI: Sybille Chiari, University, Austria. Co-PIs: Julie Doyle, University of Brighton; Climate Media Factory (Germany); Climate Outreach (UK), ONCA Centre for Arts and Ecology (UK). The research was given ethical approval by the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences and all participants gave informed consent.

4 Funded by Leverhulme Trust Artist-in-Residence Award. Project title: Here Today: Moving Images of Climate Change. October 2009–October 2011. PI: David Harradine, Fevered Sleep. Co-PI: Julie Doyle, University of Brighton.