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

Studiens syfte är att få en djupare kunskap om hur ledande turismaktörer framställer Stockholm skärgård i deras marknadsföring genom ord, bild och film. Studiens ansats har varit av en kvalitativ sådan där en kombination av netnografisk samt visuell analys har hjälpt för att samla in datamaterial. Fyra turismaktörer valdes ut för att studera hur de framställer Stockholm skärgård i deras marknadsföring på sociala medier (Youtube och Instagram) och hemsidor. Till hjälp har författaren använt sig av teorin Imaginative Geographies för att förstå hur mytiska bilder av en plats kan få en så stor inverkan att de blir kollektivt delade meningar. Resultatet visar att olika framställningar som att Stockholm skärgård ingjuter frihet, upplevs som en helt annan värld och de fantastiska landskap är romantiseringar som marknadsförs på turismaktörernas sociala medier.

Popular geography magazines like National Geographic (NG) provide readers with a lens of the world around them. Yet sadly they often only serve a limited utilitarian purpose as dust collectors on coffee tables of hospital waiting rooms or doctors’ practices. It should be of little surprise then that the relative importance of geographic magazines as a representational forum has been underestimated historically. The importance of geographic magazines as an outlet for creating and disseminating preconceived visions of what may be termed ‘popular geographies’ has only become the subject of scrutiny in the last two decades. Authors including Lutz and Collins (1993) and Rothenberg (1994, 2007) have reflected critically upon the place of NG as a powerful ideological institution for legitimating particular visions of the world in the wider corpus of the discipline of geography. Yet while there has been a substantial volume of work dedicated to unravelling the situated lens of NG there has been no research devoted to deciphering the lenses of other geography magazines such as Canadian Geographic (CG), Australian Geographic (AG) or New Zealand Geographic (NZG). These magazines also embody the ideals of adventure, discovery and nature made famous by NG but purvey geography through distinctively national narratives. Through discourse analysis the thesis examines these three magazines in order to unravel geographic imaginations of nationalism in CG, AG and NZG and in the process challenge divergent conceptions of geography itself as both an academic discipline and popular subject.