RICERCA ITALIANA     

Environmental catastrophe between reality and representation. Old and new collective movements at the test of communication

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract

The transition from the information society to the communication society, placed by scholars in the mid-nineties, also marks the beginning of an interesting period because of its radical changes in the individual and collective consciousness, which are often linked to one of the basic people’s needs: security. This is a primordial need which is definitely going to affect both the representations that are built around this theme, and those behaviours and attitudes that characterize everyday life.
Within this interpretative framework, the environmental problem becomes an interesting focus for the scholar of the social and communicative processes, as well as for the historian of science. A cultural process of great complexity hence begins to take shape. It involves a contradictory coexistence between processing systems of a “rational” and conscious kind, such as research and science, and large flows of meaning production and far more ambiguous sign communication, which are increasingly relevant in the construction of collective identities. There is a coincidence which is not only chronological – since the nineties - between the appearance of the global fear for the environmental mutation and the general shift of an economic, cultural and social order, which Manuel Castells describes as the advent of the informational development model of the network societies, based on a new articulation of communication, between the fluid world of the media and identity processes of a >>>

Principal Investigator

Mihaela Gavrila Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

Research Objectives

The research aims to develop a first version of the tools needed for a study of the media and sociocultural dynamics related to the reactions to the fear of global environmental change and natural catastrophe (especially insisting on the European and American situation), also with respect to the other collective fears that seems to characterize the current globalized world (terrorism in the first place). All of that is aimed at designing communication strategies and interventions that can affect the level of information and, above all, people’s concrete behaviors. In particular, the analysis aims at providing adequate intepretative and intervention tools needed for the comprehension and management of the crisis, starting from its media and literary representation, and the pressures coming from the bottom of collective movements that look to a real change of the lifestyles, in the direction of increasing the individual and collective well-being. Such a work will be based on the principle of the necessary synergy (around the fundamental competence of the research group, which has experience in media research, in metropolitan and post-metropolitan imagination and the languages of the arts) of further disciplinary approaches and sensibilities. The research thus also becomes a useful opportunity to put into practice some new inter and trans disciplinary approaches, with the purpose of theorical-methodological and interpretative innovation. In particular, it is considered >>>

First Results

The theme at the heart of the research titled "Environmental catastrophe between reality and representation. Old and new collective movements at the test of communication" is of a broad and transversal kind, and it has crossed, particularly in the last decade, the political and cultural debate. From the Nobel Prize for Peace to Al Gore and UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); from the interventions made by scholars and intellectuals in the national press and industry; from politicians’ speeches in Parliament and in public; to the protests brought forward by the pressure groups into the media arena, national and international; environmental disaster climate change and ecological emergency are major focuses on which the attention of the glocal public opinion converge.

The environment and the anxieties that have been developing around it have become, therefore, one of the themes at the core of the media agendas, changing at the same time the characteristics of an information that was considered by most exclusive interest of a literate niche, hence excluding the rest of the public opinion. An increased attention which mirrors the substantial absence of studies exploring the dynamics of the relationship between the various actors involved in the processes of environmental communication. If an attempt to systematize the complex relationship between environmental disaster and its representation in novels, films and television fiction has >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

It is in the long span of time ranging from the late '60s to the early '80s that we can trace, within Western societies, the breaking points of the socio-economical balance on which the progressive success, firstly political and later sociological, of the environmental issue is based. 1972 is, in fact, the year of the Stockholm Conference, organized by the United Nations with the aim of coping with those problems arising from the running out of natural resources and with the staggering increase of pollution. If the environment has been for a long time the exclusive terrain of study of the natural sciences, the discovery of the limits of development and the risks associated with the increasing urbanization and industrialization lead social scientists, headed by anthropologists and sociologists, to question the relationship between physical-natural events and social events [Beato 1998, Catton and Dunlap 1978, Gisfredi 2002, Strassoldo 1977]: "we began to recognize that this reality of environmental constraints posed serious problems to human societies and to the discipline of sociology" [Catton and Dunlap 1978, p. 44]. The environmental crisis presents, therefore, a trait of discontinuity and rift with respect to the past, a discontinuity that has been produced within the complex relationships between socio-historical and natural systems.
Nep, New Ecological Paradigm, created by Catton Dunlap in 1978, is the emblem of this turnaround. In contrast to >>>