Research Area C Environmental Activism (C13)
Environmental Activism: An Ontology of its Actors and their Politics
Project Leader: Madeleine Herren-Oesch
Project Members: Somnath Batabyal
This project presupposed that communication networks and new media forms and technologies are fundamentally altering environmental politics. Multiple actors, both state and non-state network and communicate, negotiate and alter this political terrain through myriad means. This research attempted an inventory of the major actors involved in the environmental discourse and the means, modes and flows of knowledge, of finance, of cooperation and of resistance between them. By situating the self in an NGO in India and a quasi-governmental donor agency in Sweden, the research draws on everyday practices of the actors and those around them to understand global environmental activism, its discourse and its politics. The project paid particular attention to media, both traditional and “new”. It sought to analyse how media is deployed by the various actors for information dissemination, used for activism and for lobbying and the relationship of these with “what makes news”, that is, the news determinants of environmental politics.
This project was originally conceptualized within Research Area D.