Arctic Journalisms, Civic Spaces and Indigenous Publics

Speaker(s): Candis Callison

Data@Risk Colloquium

Mobilizing Indigenous experiences with and narratives about climate change through various media provides important insight for broad global publics about what it means to live with climate change both in the observable present and the predicted future. Representing and reporting on diverse Indigenous peoples, however, can be extremely challenging given that mainstream media narratives have often tended to reproduce stereotypes, ignore Indigenous knowledges, erase the ongoing impacts of colonialism, and/or frame Indigenous people as proxies, victims, or heroes. Drawing on research related to media in and about the Canadian Arctic, this talk examines how and where journalism might contribute to communal resilience, historical understandings of adaptation and climatic shifts, and reflect robust civic spaces and imaginations among global and regional audiences that include Indigenous publics.

Candis Callison is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at UBC. Her research and teaching are focused on changes to media practices and platforms, journalism ethics, the role of social movements in public discourse, and understanding how issues related to science and technology become meaningful for diverse publics. Callison’s new book How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press 2014) uses ethnographic methods and a comparative lens to bring together the work of science journalists, scientists, and three distinct social groups that are outside environmental movement and policy frameworks in an American context. Building in part on this research, Callison was recently awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant to look at changes to professional norms, practices, and standards for Canadian Arctic journalists working in an era of environmental change and global audiences. Follow her on Twitter: @candiscallison

Event details

Annenberg School for Communication