On Thursday the 25th of April, the CCCNN hosted a workshop led by Dr Chloe Lucas, a Research Fellow and climate communication specialist in the Discipline of Geography at UTAS. Dr Chloe Lucas is a communication specialist whose research explores the social dimensions of climate change. As a documentary producer, an environmental communications consultant, and now as an academic, Chloe’s career has focused on ways to improve communication about climate and sustainability across all sections of society. Her research explores the values and experiences underlying different social responses to climate change and identifies pathways to more empathetic and inclusive climate conversations. Her recent work focuses on how communication and cultural context drives social adaptation to extreme weather events including bushfires.
In our discussion, Dr Lucas explored how cultural narratives about human relationships with nature, scientific rationality, and self-in-the-world are central to people’s understanding of climate change. Drawing on multiple interviews with people who were unconcerned about climate change, she discussed how these grouped cultural narratives can inform us about climate change discourse. Placing narratives of unconcern in the context of narratives of concern, Lucas examined what they tell us about processes of climate change communication, and at a broader scale, about the experience of living in late modernity.
Video and audio recordings of the workshop are available below.