Framing Sustainability in Language and Communication

This collection brings together established and emerging scholars for a critical framing of sustainability through the lens of language and communication, social semiotics, and media studies. The volume underscores the importance of re-envisioning sustainability around not only climate change and biodiversity loss but in broader systems of ecological, social, and economic imbalances on a global scale.

The book begins with a visual essay which provides a semiotic foundation for understandings of sustainability across disciplinary approaches in the chapters that follow. Subsequent chapters are organized around four thematic sections: reframing sustainability in a colonial world; the semiotics of sustainability; communicating sustainability in everyday life; and communicating sustainability in arts and media. A closing commentary by Crispin Thurlow offers critical reflections on sustainability within language and communication research and beyond.

This book will be of interest to scholars addressing sustainability across diverse disciplines, including language and communication, social semiotics, linguistic anthropology, environmental communication, media studies, and development studies.

Maida Kosatica is Professor of Urban Semiotics and Semantics in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research interests include semiotic landscapes, multimodal critical discourse analysis, environmental communication and displacement, and discourse of ecosystem services.

Sean P. Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research examines how discourse and (social) media shape development and practice within the contexts of the environment and tourism, informed by field research in Myanmar (Burma) and the Arabian Gulf.