// Projects

Green Media Environments is working on both short and long-term research and teaching projects. Currently under practice are:
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1. Sparking Sustainability
With colleagues from the PRAXIS-Community Media hub at the University of Sunderland, Alex Lockwood from GME successfully bid to the ADM-HEA under their Education for Sustainable Development funding stream for the ‘Sparking Sustainability’ project, to increase sustainable development content in the curriculum. This project begins in April 2010 and brings expert professional practitioners in to work with students and the local community on a project aimed at asking people to think and define for themselves, within media practice, what sustanability can be as a tool for better living.

2. MeCCSA Climate Change, Environment and Sustainabilty Networkmeccsa
With Einar Thorsen (Bournemouth), Alex Lockwood from GME has been granted a fund from the ADM-HEA to convene a network supporting media theorists, practitioners and teachers to connect around the themes of climate change, environment and sustainability. The network currently supports over 60 academics and practitioners worldwide in sharing knowledge, interest and projects around the themes.

3. RSPB Social Media for Volunteering
Alex Lockwood is currently working with the RSPB to look at how social media can be best used for recruitment and retention for volunteers to one of the UK’s leading nature charities.

We are also looking at research within these four general research themes::

1.    Truth, Power, Media and Environmental Discourse
The theoretical framework for the Green Media Environments programme. The research question asks: how is it best to bring together a set of theories of discourse to institute an original way of reading our ‘experience’ of global environmental change and ecological crises? The programme will draw on a diverse range of theoretical approaches, from ecocriticism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, eco-philosophy, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, through to social anthropology. However, these will be held together within an overarching structure that uses theories of power to explore how representations of environmental change and ecological crises are constructed. Areas for investigation include:

  • Environmental justice, class and climate
  • Climate as moral category
  • Art and ecology
  • Journalists and catastrophe
  • Different discourses: ecological debt, man-made etc.
  • Climate, environmental and biodiversity policy processes, and their coverage

2.    Structures of digital journalism delivery for environmental and social justice
Working with others in the digital sustainability field, this research area will look at the practical delivery of rethinking ways of working within the media and creative industries, and include work on:

  • Local news and environmental justice goals
  • New business models for digital journalism, news in web2.0
  • Business models in magazines – from bottom to top
  • High end magazines and environment; luxury capitalism and the media
  • Different media platforms, relation to energy use, capitalist structures

3.    Creative Industries and the Climate Crisis
The advertising, marketing and media campaigns of major corporations, including energy providers and car manufacturers, are employing representations of the environment as a means to communicate their reaction to heightened environmental sensitivity. In some cases, the advertising is aggressively counter to common perspectives on the critical aspects of global environmental change (e.g. Ford’s ‘Some of Us Prefer a Hotter Climate’ campaign to advertise the Ford Fiesta Climate; and in one case, Artemis Investment Management, the environment is used as a hermetic metaphor to represent profit as the target of a game hunt). This research theme will provide a semiological reading of key advertising texts within their media and cultural contexts, and combine analysis with questions of the productive forces of commercialisation as it represents the environment, and environmental change.

4.    Experiencing environments: ways to read cultural representations of ecological crises
Addressing specific ecological and environmental issues, such as wind farm planning, coastal erosion and sea level rise, environmental migration of displaced communities, etc, through:

  • Media coverage and representation
  • Photography and photojournalism; visualising climate
  • Media relations with other forms of creative representation, e.g. literary, visual, artistic