Program 

12.00: Lunch and Registration 

13:00-13.05: Welcome  

13:05-13.55: Introductory plenary session: How can we make sense of the diverse but patterned ways of EC practice? Insights from the “Exploring Environmental Communication Cultures” project. Malte Rödl and Christoffer Söderlund-Kanarp.   

Environmental Communication is a broad and multifaceted field of practice, which is illustrated by the diversity of partners of the Mistra Environmental Communication Programme. The programme aims to significantly impact this complex field and support the mainstreaming of a more nuanced understanding of communication and change. For this, a detailed understanding of this field of practice is necessary.  

Our project contributes to this understanding, and during the spring we studied Environmental Communication as a field of practice, through documentary research and interviews with professionals ranging from journalists, environmental consultants to mountain guides and influencers.   

Here we give a sneak preview of our theoretical and empirical findings so far. This includes our conceptualisation of the patterned and routinised nature in environmental communication professions and tasks as “EC cultures”, what dilemmas and problems practitioners encounter in practice, how they understand these problems and rationalise responses to them, and what understandings of society, environment and change this is based on.  

14:00-15:00: Parallel sessions I  

Session 1: Society, Mistra Environmental Communication and I. Sanna Barrineau & Thao Do, in collaboration with the Tools & Networks team  

In this interactive session we will explore a few simple and fundamental questions, that are nevertheless large and difficult to answer, including how can our research be useful? and what is the role of research and the researcher? We approach these questions through an exploration of our orientations towards the future and how our agency to imagine and create futures shapes our capacities to build research practices and projects for societal benefit. The purpose is to take a step back and examine the basis of our assumptions about futures and our abilities to influence them. In this, we may discover opportunities to challenge our answers and reflect deeply on the initial, simple questions. Session from WP5 in afternoon could be a nice follow-up.   

Session 2: Institutionalized climate obstruction as buzzwords – Metaphors we deny by Jutta Haider, WP1   

In this session we want to pool expertise, experiences and ideas to have a conversation on how and which metaphors and similar concepts and figures of speech are used to deny, ignore, diminish, or trivialise the ongoing climate and environmental crises.  Climate denial and other forms of denying and ignoring environmental degradation rely on language that makes supporting obstruction or delaying action seem reasonable, desirable or inevitable. What metaphors and similar concepts or figures of speech can we identify? How do they work? What expertise and literature is needed to develop a more systematic understanding of these? Can the notion of ‘metaphors we deny’ be developed into an analytical device for interrogating the various assumptions that configure, and so restrict, the possibilities for environmental meaning-making?   

The specific aim is to begin to draw up an inventory, but also to discuss conceptual/theoretical issues and tensions (e.g. related to Lakoff & Johnson’s “Metaphors we live by”). This session will hopefully be the beginning of a longer project, that will result in a dictionary-like book (edited volume).  

Session 3: The Role of Emotions in Governing Sustainability Transformations: What Have We Experienced, What Do We Know, and What Do We Do?, Martin Westin WP4  

In our work on collaborative governance in WP4, we find ourselves both troubled and intrigued by the role emotions play. Within predominant cultures of governance, emotions are often marginalised in favour of a rational, fact-based discourse. At the same time, populist politicians have become increasingly skilled at mobilising resistance to sustainability transformations by appealing to emotions such as anger, grief, and resentment.  

This troublesome treatment of emotions raises a pressing question: how can emotions play a more constructive role in the governing of sustainability transformations?  

To pursue this question, this workshop will bring together experiences from across and beyond the Mistra EC programme. We will map what we have learned in practice, what research is being conducted, and what knowledge has already been developed. The aim is to create a shared overview to inform future research and development, identify connections, and inspire collaboration.  

15:00 – 15:30 Fika  

15:30-17.00: Parallel Sessions II  

Session 4: If/when/should/how does environmental communication enable cultural change? Sara Holmgren, WP5  

To achieve more profound sustainability transformations, many argue we need to become better at seeing and changing the cultural meanings that shape what we perceive, how we think, and how we act. That also includes science.  

It has been argued that “science has itself become an obstacle for the transformations that are needed to ensure human-ecological well-being” (Turnhout 2024). The aim to provide space for EC researchers and practitioners to come together and critically interrogate environmental communication research and practice that aims for sustainability transformations. Is cultural change even something we should work actively to enable? And change towards what? Through this discussion we intend to question if fostering cultural change is even what we want?  

We will approach culture in a broad sense, referring to understandings, practices, norms and values that structure how we think, interact, relate and interact with human and non-human worlds.  We invite participants to reflect upon their own practice, cultural embeddedness, assumptions and understandings of transformations, and discuss if/how we could/should do things differently to enable transformations.   

Session 5: What is ‘environment’ to you? – A creative writing workshop for academics, René van der Wal and the E in EC project  

What is ‘environment’ to you? How do you write about or with it within your work? And do you feel others do this in similar or rather different ways? It’s those rather hidden dimensions of ‘environment that we would like to explore together. We will engage with a series of short texts about current environmental issues and explore how communication around these issues could look like from your perspective. By physically re-working text and discussing our different approaches to this, we hope to unpack what the underlying assumptions about “environment” are within our work. How does giving more or less attention to ‘environment’ in various ways (such as in a physical, relationship-wise or spiritual way) influence what we do? What we hope to learn together is how an awareness of diverse ways of ‘working with environment’ may help us being sensitive to perspectives of environment held by others.    

17:15-: Plenary Wrap-Up and Mingle: Are we getting one step closer towards Mistra Environmental Communication’s vision?  

Based on the insights and discussions from the parallel session, and with help of the lens of “EC-cultures” we explore the ways of thinking about environmental communication as a field of professional practice:. How can understanding of these diverse but patterned ways help us to make EC research more relevant? How can it contribute to Mistra EC’s vision?  

18:00 Dinner at Övre Slotts 

Only Mistra Environmental Communication programme partners can register for this day. On October 8, we have a day for the public, read more about Miljökommunikationsdagen 2025 here.