Genre in the Climate Debate. Promotional text sketch.

Later this year my edited volume Genre in the Climate Debate will be published by De Gruyter. I have edited it with my very talented and extremely friendly colleague Christel Sunesen. You can find her webpage here. A part of preparing such a volume is promotion and I am a right fool at writing these auto-panegyrical genres, so here's my first sketch for a brief promotional text. How does this sound?

The volume offers an intriguing and enlightening new approach to the climate debate by taking it as a question of genre. Genres play a vital role in human interaction, as we use them to learn, to express ourselves, and to act. Thus, genres, and the use of genres by individual actors, determine how knowledge of climate change spreads or not from the scientific community to a broader public and how it is debated and acted on.

Update: A good friend on Twitter, Alexander King (or @ASElliotKing in twitter-speak), made his suggestions in the form of a picture.

Update 2: Thanks to good friends and kind twitterati like Alexander the blurb now looks like this. Comments still welcome.

The volume offers an intriguing and enlightening new approach to the climate debate by taking it as a question of genre. Genres play a vital role in human interaction, as we use them to learn, express ourselves, and to act. How individual actors utilize or manipulate genres determines to what extent knowledge of climate change spreads from the scientific community to the public, how it is debated, and to what extent it leads to positive action.

Genres and media landscapes in virtual-physical learning spaces. Moving frontlines?

International conference of the CCD network, School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, 12-14 September 2018

The international conference Genres and media landscapes in virtual-physical learning spaces. Moving frontlines?, GeM 2018, aims to create a multi-disciplinary platform for dialoguing on the every-day uses of modality rich, parallel, linked, and hybrid, communicative genres that are embedded in media landscapes and circulate in learning spaces inside and outside institutional settings. The digitized era and the global world of mobility and migration have brought about a shift for human-beings in general and the research enterprise more specifically, thus, making it necessary to (re)consider conditions for communication or languaging as well as for learning and identity production. Today, analogue and digital dimensions are seen as being blurred and interdependent, just as accumulation, density and change, are fundamental features of media landscapes. Genres for representation and communication are created, renewed, transformed and fluid in these flexible and expanding environments 

More information and full CfP here.

Oh, and I am there as a featured speaker and so are a plethora of other highly fascinating researchers. 

Brexit Genres

I am supposedly on Twitter to discuss genre research (my twitterhandle is indeed  @genreresearch). However, as a huge fan of the EU, I have been lured into spending quite a bit of time hanging around the #FBPE-crowd and discussing Brexit instead. 

Or is that indeed "instead"? A central finding of genre studies is that genre is well-nigh omnipresent in human culture, cognition, and communication. Thus, we think, react, and act in genre patterns, and we all have a surprising aptitude for understanding and using genre. Thus, if you participate in the Brexit debate it may never have entered your mind that you are constantly using and discussing genre. But you are.

Allow me to show you.

At the center of the Brexit debate (itself a genre) is a thing called a "referendum". That's a genre. Moreover, this particular referendum had as its particular character that it was an "advisory referendum". A variant genre or, if you will, subgenre to the referendum. Now, as you know, the fact that this was an "advisory referendum" meant that a number of safeguards connected to stonger referendums (for example a demand for a supermajority) were not present. Had such safeguards been in place, Brexit wouldn´t be on its way

However, and this is, as you still know very well, just not in those terms, the result of the advisory referendum result (another genre) was taken up, not as a narrow win (yet another genre), but as an expression (genre) of a metaphysical entity called The Will of The People. This nonewithstanding that there were critical problems connected to several crucial genres in connection with the advisory referendum. One being that one of the campaigns (genre) leading up to the referendum were dominated by lies (yet another genre). Another genre which should ideally have played a crucial role to both campaigns, the "expert testimony", was aggressively discounted beforehand, and never got to play its necessary part in enligtening the decision of the voters.

Then, of course, there was the hidden asymmetry of the "voting ballot" (yep that's a genre too) which displayed to completly unequal opportunities, one well-known and stable (remain) another almost wholly unknown and highly dramatic (leave) as if they were similar.

And this is just the beginning. The resulting "advise", taken up as a "decision", gave rise to "negotiations", and "debates", including (far too few) "parliamentary debates". Into this came "newspaper headlines" and "articles" leading to, among other things "death threats". Leading, of course, to the rise of a number of "SoMe interchanges" which helped form "hashtags" (yep, a genre). So basically y'all. While we are FBPE-ing, we are also acting in accordance with a set of genre expectations.

This post is a genre-reconfiguration. It was originally a Twitter thread. You can see the thread here. After the thread I have added a number of specimen of other, more special genres I have found in the Brexit debate. Check it out.