Focus area 2 – Meaning-making

Processes of meaning-making in environmental communication

This focus area places the role of emotions in environmental communication and sustainability transitions at the centre. Climate change and biodiversity loss, as some of the most defining issues of our time, are known to cause a range of emotional responses, from anxiety and fear to hopelessness. How do individuals and groups deal with such emotions? How can social institutions play a role in negotiating individual responses and create a space for shared meaning-making and reflection in the face of serious threats to life on earth?

Theme leader

Maria Johansson

Leader of the focus area Meaning-making
Lunds university
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Professor in Environmental psychology with research interest in human-environment transactions from the perspective of the individual.

Scientific information is necessary for limiting or reversing the negative consequences of global environmental changes. However, such information alone is not enough to foster sufficient engagement and commitment for the more comprehensive sustainability transformations that are needed. In this focus area we investigate the role of emotions for environmental engagement: we analyse how people talk and what feelings they express, and how this relates to their environmental commitment.

We draw on both the discipline of environmental psychology to shed light on emotions as intra-individual processes and experiences, and the field of environmental communication to analyse emotions as the result of social interaction and norms, and how emotions are mobilized politically in discursive struggles.

We investigate emotions in meaning-making in different settings, including history and art exhibitions, but also nature reserves, and do so in close collaboration with the Swedish History Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and Naturum visitor centres.

Processes of meaning-making in environmental communication

Maria Johansson

Publications