Communicating Climate Change

Emory University, Fall 2022

There is no facet of contemporary life left untouched by climate change. If rhetoric can be understood as the theory, practice, and art of ethical communication, then developing rigorous modes of communicating about climate change is one of its central tasks. This is a challenge, to say the least.

After all, how do we communicate about something that can make us feel so bad? About something that so many are in denial of? How do we confront, and sustain the attention and commitment to write about, something as apocalyptic as climate change? In this course, we will collectively try.

To aid us, we will read environmental and Indigenous activists, political theorists, philosophers, and scholars of literature and culture including Naomi Klein, Greta Thunberg, Min Hyoung Song, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and The Red Nation. These communicators will help us better grasp climate change’s social effects and the ways it intersects with racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.

The idea of this course is not to “solve” climate change or even to fully understand it scientifically. It is, rather, to confront it as an indelible aspect of our personal and collective lives, of the subjective and the political. From there, we will work to find new ways of writing about climate change so that we may confront it with more knowledge, understanding, and courage; communicate about it responsibly, ethically, and compellingly; and better determine: how should we live?