Event Details

"Talking About Climate Change:  A Linguistic Approach to Identity and Action"
Speaker:  Jessica Love-Nichols, Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Macalester College

Cultural affiliation and social identity play an important role in the communication of environmental information, especially around the growing climate crisis. This talk illustrates the impact of social identity on the communication strategies used to encourage climate change action among self-identified hunters and fishers in the U.S. Contemporary hunters and fishers are a community situated at the intersection of seemingly opposed social identities—members generally identify as rural political conservatives, but environmental conservationists. Hunters and fishers who want to galvanize action on climate change within this politically-conservative community therefore use many linguistic resources to balance their commitments as both politically- and environmentally-conscious actors. This talk specifically explores their use of two types of linguistic resources—regional accents and spatiotemporal framing—that allow speakers’ reinforcement of their sociocultural positioning while at the same time encouraging climate action.

Jessica Love-Nichols' research focuses on gender, class, and regional identities—how people position themselves and others linguistically and ideologically—and especially on the relationship of language and identity to environmental conservation.

This EnviroThursday is co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies and Linguistics Departments.