Title dissertation:
From Science Communication to Science Diplomacy. Setting the Agenda on Arctic Marine Mammals
Topic trial lecture:
How can sociological media theory enable us to better understand the interplay between environmental research and narratives for more effective policy action in the digital age?
Time for trial lecture: 10:15 – 11:15
Time for public defence: 12:15 – 15:30
Place: Bodø, A13 Elias Blix and streaming
Chair of defence: Dean Elisabet Ljunggren
Assessment committee:
- Professor Jason Colby, University of Victoria, Canada
- Adjunct Professor Melody Brown Burkins, Dartmouth College, US
- Postdoctoral Fellow Rojan Tordhol Ezzati, Nord University
Supervisors:
- Main supervisor: Professor Corine Wood-Donnelly, Nord University
- Co-supervisor: Professor Hannes Hansen-Magnusson, Cardiff University
The thesis is available for viewing by contacting Anneli Watterud, e-mail: anneli.m.watterud@nord.no.
About the thesis:
From the climate crisis to pollution and biodiversity loss, we are facing a host of environmental issues. Their impacts are especially visible in the Arctic, the planet’s fastest-warming region, with Arctic marine mammals (AMMs) – polar bears, seals, walruses, and whales – often framed as representatives of these crises. Be it a lonely polar bear drifting on an ice floe or walruses fighting for space on an overcrowded beach, this thesis asks why and how these stories invoking AMMs are constructed and how they can potentially be improved to ensure that the most pressing environmental issues facing our planet rise to the top of the political and media agenda. Specifically, I focus on how the practitioners employing the agenda-setting practices of science communication, journalism, policy and diplomacy create and engage with these stories.
I anchor my research in environmental and media sociology within the context of human-animal studies to examine how practitioners frame AMMs in environmental news and policy discourses. To do so, I conducted semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with practitioners and analysed news and policy documents, resulting in four peer-reviewed single-authored articles.
The first article explores practitioners’ motivations to invoke AMMs in environmental news reporting, highlighting their aim to raise awareness and provoke political actions to address environmental issues threatening AMMs. The paper also highlights problematic trends in AMM-based news reporting and their potential causes. The second article analyses 120 years of news reporting on seal governance in the North American Arctic, highlighting shifts in framing. The third paper focuses on polar bear governance, contrasting policy discourses across two distinct eras and advancing the conceptualisation of Arctic science diplomacy by establishing a set of success criteria. The fourth article discusses the contributions of science communication practitioners to science diplomacy efforts regarding AMM governance, utilising Leach’s 2015 framework to identify three applications of science communication in science diplomacy: raising awareness, policy communication, and public outreach.
The Kappe contextualises the articles, presenting four actionable takeaways for practitioners to improve AMM-based environmental communications: Practitioners need to 1) consider the human perspectives from which AMM-based communications are created, and the lived realities and knowledges of local and Indigenous Arctic communities; 2) support local news reporting to facilitate authentic news coverage from the North about the North; 3) strengthen practitioner relationships to ensure the kind of transparent and open exchange necessary for successful science communication, journalism, policy, and diplomacy to occur; and 4) diversify flagship species,
playing on a broader cast of charismatic species representing the impacts of environmental crises to minimise the fallout of misinformation targeting specific flagship species, such as polar bears.
