How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Experimental Futures)

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility. The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise. Candis Callison is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. A Rich Ethnographic Account Describing The Processes By Which Climate Change Comes To Matter Collectively And Individually, And How Vernacular Explanations Of Climate Change Reflect Diverse Ways Of Knowing And Caring About The World. The Inuit Gift -- Reporting On Climate Change -- Blessing The Facts -- Negotiating Risk, Expertise, And Near-advocacy -- What Gets Measured Gets Managed -- Epilogue: Rethinking Public Engagement And Collaboration -- Appendix: A Decade Of Climate Change. Candis Callison. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 14 One: The Inuit Gift......Page 52 Two: Reporting on Climate Change......Page 94 Three: Blessing the Facts......Page 134 Four: Negotiating Risk, Expertise, and Near-Advocacy......Page 175 Five: What Gets Measured Gets Managed......Page 214 Epilogue: Rethinking Public Engagement and Collaboration......Page 256 Appendix: A Decade of Climate Change......Page 266 Notes......Page 276 References......Page 296 Index......Page 316