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This dissertation examines how gender operates as agencies for women’s environmental justice activism. I contend that women’s activism, often taking place through collaborative and collective means, presents new opportunities to theorize rhetorical agency that include women-centric and leaderless forms of grassroots organizing. To this end, I explore various agencies for women’s collaborative environmental communication—motherhood, eco-spirituality, and political calls for recognition—that work to test the boundary conditions of rhetorical studies in ways that find empowerment and resistance in a collective rather than in any one particular person. In developing these accounts, I construct a framework that emphasizes the agentic capabilities possible through collaborative rhetorics of resistance—the communicative performances of defiance and empowerment put forth by groups of people that often result in the articulation of collective identities, the challenging of dominant structures and institutions of power, and work to inspire mutual critique and reflection in others. Theories of rhetorical agency assist in documenting and illuminating the ways speakers navigate discursive and material constraints as they bring their audience to action, but often do so by privileging the rhetoric of individual (male) speakers. By exploring collaborative rhetorics of resistance, this dissertation project tests the boundary conditions of rhetorical agency and generates a more comprehensive understanding of how loose networks of people enter into, take part in, and possibly redirect the course of environmental deliberations. This dissertation project is focused on the ways in which women rhetorically collaborate to craft collective subjectivities, protest environmental threats to their families and communities, and inspire mutual critique and reflection in others.

Utilizing J.E. Grunig's (1989a, 1997) situational theory of publics and Fishbein and Ajzen's (1975) theory of reasoned action, this empirical study examined the public's perception of reclaimed water. Specifically, the three independent variables - problem recognition, constraint recognition, and level of involvement - were separated into internal and external variables to determine their influences on behavioral intention. The independent variables were also used to determine the public's communication behavioral intention. The findings of this study support the basic premise of the situational theory of publics and contribute to the extension of the theory through the inclusion of some of the variables used in the theory of reasoned action - subjective norm, attitude towards behavior, and behavioral intention. The importance of attitude towards behavior to the prediction of behavioral intention was found to be significant. Overall, the results of this research suggest that the situational theory of publics and the theory of reasoned action are very compatible together and can be combined in research to ultimately determine a public's communication behavior and actual behavior.

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The energy sector has gone through changes, it has been liberalised, sustainable development has added a new dimension, and companies operating in it are increasingly expected to demonstrate environmental responsibility. In this thesis how the concepts of sustainable development and environmental responsibility are treated rhetorically in the corporate environmental communication of three Swedish electricity companies is analysed. The corporate environmental communication is viewed as a part of the companies’ public relations strategies. Rhetoric is used by companies to establish and maintain good relations with their stakeholders. If the premise that rhetoric has the ability to do something through its creation and promotion of meaning is accepted, the corporate rhetor plays a part in the definition and shaping of societal values, standards of business and public policy. It is argued that the electricity companies all present themselves as being responsible and sustainable though these claims contribute little to the definition of what environmental responsibility means and what sustainable electricity production is. The rhetoric used is a means for gaining legitimacy and competitive advantages to go on with business as usual. The electricity companies’ very similar rhetorical strategies pose an obstacle for stakeholders trying to evaluate the environmental performance of the companies.

Environmental challenges do not exist around by themselves. They are constructed andput in our mind by the key stakeholders, who draw public attention to certain issues. People experience the world through the words of others. Construction of environmental concerns is an ever ongoing process, and we need to be aware about things that can change. In the 60s the world was concerned about limited number of issues, whilst today the planet seems to shout from pain, though in fact amount of problems have hardly raised. It is environmental organizations’ desert that people managed to raise their awareness about the world. This study exposes social constructs of environmental challenges created and narrated through social media by two leading environmental organizations, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature. For this purpose, theories of social constructionism and agenda setting serve as the main theoretical framework. Therefore, most actively social media used by ENGOs was identified to be Facebook. The insight to the topic was provided by the content analysis of status updates from both organizations’ fan pages for the period from September 2009 to May 2012. It showed that social constructs of environmental challenges are not equally distributed in the world and number of concerns is disregarded. ENGOs do hope that regular citizens can contribute to sustainability, by giving real support to the projects which aim to have impact on policy makers. Our awareness let changes on the governmental level happen, as ‘when ENGOs speak, people debate, and policy makershear’. Thereby, through media construction of challenges solutions to them are articulated as well.

Insects are not really beloved by many people, although their importance for humankind and the planet’s ecosystem is out of question. The lack of resonance and emotional attachment towards insects have an immense impact on how politics deal with the fact that the number of insects is decreasing and the ecological balance is threatened as a consequence. This thesis contributes to the understanding of the role of emotions in environmental discourses and examines the societal meaning of the insect biodiversity. Analysing how the discourse is visualised and communicated in the media shows how and to what extent different emotions are evoked to make people care about insects, be engaged and mobilised. Emotions can be seen as the base for caring and feeling responsible for the natural word, establishing ecological awareness and inducing socio-political change.

As the climate crisis continues unabated, documentary films have become an increasingly popular medium through which to communicate its causes and impacts. Such films are an easily accessible form of mass media that has the potential to reach wide-ranging and large audiences, and often star popular celebrities. However, few academic studies have examined climate change documentaries and considered the ‘story’ of climate change that such films create. The lack of critical engagement with climate change documentaries is significant as it suggests the narratives of such films have been left largely unexamined despite their importance as a form of popular environmental communication. In this thesis, I use content analysis and narrative analysis to examine how 10 popular climate change documentaries tell the ‘story’ of climate change and produce specific ‘imaginative geographies’ about regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Though I note throughout my analysis that there are several moments of rupture in which counter-narratives emerge, the dominant discourse throughout these 10 films is one that generally reinforces Western science and technocratic modernity as the solution to climate change, and racialized ‘Others’ as its passive victims. Understanding how climate change documentaries construct their narratives and select their specific topics of focus provides important insight into how popular ‘imaginaries’ regarding the climate crisis have been produced. / Graduate

Title: Media framing of the Norilsk oil spill Author: Daria Tsymbal Supervisor: Mgr. Jan Miessler, Department of Media Studies, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism (ICSJ) Abstract: This study examines how the Norilsk oil spill in May 2020 was framed within four factors of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT): 1. Severity of the damage; 2. Crisis responsibility; 4. Crisis history; 5. Relationship history. Also, this study examines how media ownership and closeness of the media to the government influence the framing of Norilsk Oil Spill. Using content analyses, three Russian newspapers were analyzed - Novaya Gazeta, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and Kommersant. The results demonstrated differences in usage and frequency of frames according to media ownership and closeness to the government. Also, findings revealed that there are differences in framing concerning time frame. This thesis provides evidence that four factors in SCCT concepts (Severity of the damage, Crisis responsibility, Crisis history, Relationship history) can serve as frames in media framing analyses of crises. In addition, this study provides information for crisis managers and media professionals on how one particular crisis may be differently framed in different newspapers. Keywords: Media, crisis communication,...

The core aim of this research is to explore the communication processes of the Transition movement, a community-led global social movement as it adapted in a local context. The Transition movement facilitates community-led responses to the current global financial and climate crisis via the Transition Network, an online network that began in 2006, and is comprised of more than 2000 initiatives in 35 countries that have used the Transition model to start projects that use small-scale solutions to achieve greater sustainability. This research uses qualitative ethnographic methods and a theoretical framework based on actor network theory to better understand how the movement’s grand narratives of “climate change” and “peak oil” are communicated into local community-based stories, responses, and actions toward sustainability, and secondly, to analyze the multilayered communication processes that facilitate these actions toward sustainable social change. Transition projects address a wide range of issues, including reducing dependency on peak-oil, creating community-based-local economies, supporting sustainable food production and consumption, building efficient transportation, housing, and more diverse and inclusive education. The Transition model provides a participatory communication framework laid out in specific stages for communities to begin this process. The popularity of the model coincides with an increase in the interest in and use of the term “sustainability” by media, academics and policymakers around the world, and an increase in the global use of digital technology as a resource for information gathering and sharing. Thus this study situates itself at the intersections of a global environmental and economic crisis, the popularization of the term “sustainability,” and an increasingly digitized and networked global society in order to better understand how social change is contextualized and facilitated in a local community via a global network. From the findings, I argue that although the model’s rapid growth can be attributed, in part, to an appealing narrative that reframes more traditional environmental movement discourse into solutions-based community-focused actions, the movement would do well to develop more organized communication processes around connecting with and recognizing other people and groups who share similar values and goals, and around defining and creating the space for consistent and efficient leaders. This study also reveals that members of Transition Amherst had mixed feelings about the group’s success and this was attributed to a wide range of interpretations of the model and the purpose it serves, particularly in towns where the ideology of Transition has already, to some extent, been adopted.