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Dr. Reiner Grundman will be joining our Center as a visiting scholar in March. Reiner Grundmann is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Nottingham (UK). He has a long standing interest in sustainability and global environmental problems. His research explores the relation between knowledge and decision making, the role of expertise and public discourses, and comparative media analysis across countries and issues. He is also part of a large interdisciplinary project on urban sustainability, comparing the cities of Nottingham, Stuttgart, Chengdu and Shanghai.
As part of this visit, he will be giving a noontime talk:
March 9, 2016
12:00 – 1:00 PM
CSTPR Conference Room, 1333 Grandview Avenue
Webcast (enter as guest)
Media Coverage of Climate Change in a Comparative Perspective
by Reiner Grundmann
Science and Technology Studies, University of Nottingham
Climate change is a global process which is addressed by international institutions but receives different responses in different countries. Countries differ, economically, politically, and culturally. However, much research is conducted on a national basis. This is entirely reasonable given the resource restrictions, both in terms of linguistic competence and amount of data. But it is not adequate for the challenge to understand the differences and commonalities of news reporting across countries. In this talk I will present findings from a comparison of the newspaper coverage of climate change in France, Germany, the UK, and the USA. This research is based on corpus linguistics methodology. I will show that the discourse in these four countries is different in that the press uses different terms to describe the problem, and that it assigns different meanings to these terms. Different domestic policy issues drive the climate change discourse. I will also show who the main claims makers in the media are and that so-called skeptical voices are by far in the minority.
