Framing Science for Public Action

Framing is widely acknowledged to be central to understanding how language constructs public controversies. This paper draws on framing-for-deliberation and framing-for-difference to develop principles for framing science communication

Cultural Discourses of Public Engagement: Insights for Energy System Transformation

Our case study explores the public’s roles in energy transition by examining public participation processes and their meanings in Boulder’s Energy Future. Drawing on Cultural Discourse Analysis (Carbaugh, 2007b) as an analytical framework, we investigate discourses of public participation active in city council meetings as resources for generating insights about how to design more meaningful engagement practices. Our analysis traces meanings attached to attending and speaking at city council meetings, emailing council, outreach and education efforts, task force service, and voting. These practices and meanings provide insights for designing future public participation as well as theorizing public participation in energy governance

Do Experts Help or Hinder? An Empirical Examination of Experts and Expertise during Public Deliberation

We consider expertise in interaction during small group public deliberations. Taking communication as design, we analyze the intentional design of deliberative format using invited experts to support public discussions. Through discourse analysis of one expert’s interventions into the group discussion, we suggest how expertise might best contribute to public deliberation

The Skunkwork of Ecological Engagement

Ecological engagement is about attending to the possibilities of dwelling in a place; skunkwork is a way of orienting this dwelling. Skunkwork refers to creative, self-coordinated, collective work in informal spaces of learning and reminds us that ecologically attuned work in the world can promote unexpected, yet collectively desired, change. In this essay, we describe how we used skunkwork to orient our ecological engagement in two workshops on ‘community resilience.’ In both workshops, Boulder Creek became our commonplace, with its history of flooding and abatements as well as one city’s planning and management of crisis and sustainability. We draw from our respective home ecologies and our collective experiences in these workshops to highlight how four attributes of skunkwork and ecological engagement, namely proximity, movement, ecological narration, and weak theory, contribute to community engagement scholarship and advocacy

Environmental Communication Pedagogy for Sustainability: Developing Core Capacities to Engage with Complex Problems

Pedagogy informed by environmental communication can enhance collaboration within and outside the classroom. Through our collaborative, sustainability-focused work within the United States and internationally, we identified core capacities that prepare people to work together to form inclusive organizations and identify and respond to pressing socioecological problems.We describe six activities we have used in adult learner classrooms, on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research teams, and with organizational, governmental, and business partners to improve collaborations for sustainability-related problem solving. We conclude with a reflection on opportunities for situated assessment practices

Cultural Discourses of Public Engagement: Insights for Energy System Transformation

Our case study explores the public’s roles in energy transition by examining public participation processes and their meanings in Boulder’s Energy Future. Drawing on Cultural Discourse Analysis (Carbaugh, 2007b) as an analytical framework, we investigate discourses of public participation active in city council meetings as resources for generating insights about how to design more meaningful engagement practices. Our analysis traces meanings attached to attending and speaking at city council meetings, emailing council, outreach and education efforts, task force service, and voting. These practices and meanings provide insights for designing future public participation as well as theorizing public participation in energy governance.</p

Do Experts Help or Hinder? An Empirical Examination of Experts and Expertise during Public Deliberation

We consider expertise in interaction during small group public deliberations. Taking communication as design, we analyze the intentional design of deliberative format using invited experts to support public discussions. Through discourse analysis of one expert’s interventions into the group discussion, we suggest how expertise might best contribute to public deliberation.</p

Grouping Processes in a Public Meeting from an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis Perspective

This article explicates grouping processes during a public meeting. By applying an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis approach, the analysis focuses on ways of place-making and relating as well as enactments of social and racial identities to make empirically grounded claims about grouping processes during the public meeting in question. For most audience members, living in the neighborhood and local knowledge of crime, desperate youth, poverty, and racial discrimination were defining characteristics of being a community member who shared a collective memory of distrust against the local Chamber of Commerce. Some audience members maintained that only neighborhood residents had the right to talk about the neighborhood at the meeting. Chamber of Commerce and affiliated speakers neither shared the premise of residency and right to talk about the neighborhood, nor did they adequately address the distrust. Instead, they promoted community through economic development and collaboration. The tensions during the meeting can be described as differences in notions about what constitutes community, differences which are indicative and constitutive of the divergent approaches to managing problems in the neighborhood. In addition to illustrating that groups don’t exist a priori but are enacted through communicative practices, the article makes recommendations for how to improve public meetings

Climate Change and Globalization in the Americas: Case Studies of Mitigation and Adaptation

Robin Leichenko and Karen O‘Brien have proposed ―double exposure‖ as a conceptual framework to demonstrate how processes of globalization and global environmental change (GEC) redefine risk and encourage new, interrelated responses to social and ecological transitions (O‘Brien and Leichenko, 2000; Leichenko and O\u27Brien, 2008). In particular, the concept encourages researchers and policy makers to consider interplay between global climate change and globalization and how this is expressed unevenly across space. After reviewing the ways double exposure has been used in the literature, we consider four case studies to investigate the utility of the framework for analyzing and understanding climate change adaptation and mitigation in the Americas. Our case studies include (1) dengue and malaria outbreaks in Jamaica, (2) agriculture in the Argentinean drylands, (3) hydroelectric production in northwestern Panama, and (4) climate change mitigation through carbon offsets at a regional level in Latin America. We agree with O‘Brien and Leichenko (2000) that double exposure can be used to highlight at multiple scales the so-called \u27winners‘ and \u27losers‘ created by current global transitions and thus we seek to apply the framework to research in new arenas. Double exposure brings focus to human-environmental interactions. This attention could be, and often is, recognized without the use of the double exposure framework, but the use of this heuristic devise is particularly compelling in that it encourages contemplation about ways in which uneven development advantages some groups and individuals at the expense of others. For example, those that benefit from globalization and climate change economics can often be conceptually paired with those that are made more vulnerable, as we demonstrate in the agricultural and energy sectors. In addition, double exposure helps demonstrate the interrelation of development trade-offs, as we also exhibit through case study analysis. In our conclusion, to encourage on-going engagement with double exposure as a research lens, we (1) identify potential limitations of the existing framework, (2) recommend complementary bodies of literature, and (3) discuss ethical implications of our research findings