Social Semiotics Special Issue
Recontextualizing Climate Change: Commodification and Depoliticization in Everyday Semiotics
Guest Editors:
Changpeng Huan and Monica Colombo
Special Issue Information
Climate change has become one of the defining concerns of contemporary public life and a pervasive communicative phenomenon. References to saving the planet now saturate everyday commercial, instutional, educational and cultural spaces, appearing on coffee cups, fast-fashion labels, boarding passes, investment fund brochures, tourism campaigns, and children’s picture books. The language and imagery of environmental responsibility have become a routine feature of everyday life. Yet this communicative ubiquity coexists with a widely documented gap between discourse and material reality: carbon emissions continue to rise, biodiversity loss accelerates, and international climate targets remain, by most credible assessments, drastically undermet.
A substantial body of scholarship has productively examined the discursive construction of climate change in media, politics, and science communication, drawing on critical discourse analysis, framing theory, and multimodal analysis. This growing body of work has generated important insights into how climate change is represented, contested, and denied in institutional settings. Yet, what it has been less attentive to is the more diffuse process by which climate change is entering and reorganising the ordinary texture of everyday life, reshaping how products are branded, how places are designed and signposted, how stories are told to children, how food is marketed, how travel is sold, how futures are imagined. As climate issues are recontextualised into commercial and institutional domains, they are frequently depoliticised, stripped of their radical urgency and repackaged to align with the logics of consumerism and corporate branding.
The green palette dominating corporate visual identities, the carbon labels on food packaging, and the deployment of AI tools to generate marketing-aligned ecological futures are not merely representations of climate change; they are profound instances of semiotic recontextualization. They signify shifts in the availability, configuration, and social valuation of meaning-making resources. Climate change is thus not only a topic of public debate but a force remaking the communicative fabric of the everyday, often serving commercial interests as much as, or more than, ecological ones.
This special issue invites critical, empirically grounded studies that examine this remaking. Our primary interest lies in how climate concern is taken up, reshaped, commodified, and depoliticised as it enters the communicative routines of daily life. We welcome contributions from across discourse studies, social semiotics, multimodal analysis, media and communication research, critical marketing studies, visual culture, and related fields. What unites the special issue is not a single methodology but a shared commitment to critical, evidence-based analysis of how the language and imagery of environmental responsibility are detached from their material conditions and domesticated within everyday semiotic practices.
Topics
We invite submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following areas of inquiry.
The commodification of saving the planet. References to environmental responsibility are now an integral part of everyday commercial life, yet the underlying material issues they attempt to resolve have remainly largely unchanged. How has the notion of ‘saving the planet’ been incorporated into the realm of branding, marketing and consumer culture? How do corporations, retailers, service providers package green concerns as a selling point, through green product design, sustainability pledges, carbon-neutral labelling, and eco-tourism marketing? We invite research that takes ‘green washing’ beyond just being false representations but as a logic of communication with its own design principles and conditions of credibility, and that asks: what happens to environmental politics when its language and imagery become raw material for commodity culture?
The political economy of AI in climate discourse. Rather than analyzing AI generated outputs in a vacuum, we invite research that understands how AI tools are implemented and utilized in climate communications. How do the base search parameters, data sets used to train these tools, and dependency upon low cost, open access image libraries that typically reflect the aesthetic of commercial advertising influence the creation of symbolic representations of climate change? How does the institutional use of AI recontextualize or de-politicize the climate crisis? How AI-driven semiotic production serves specific commercial interests and reshapes public encounters with climate information?
Corporate semiotics and consumer culture. How do corporations construct and recontextualise climate concern using branding, visual identity, ESG reporting, and public relations? What tensions, contradictions, or strategic ambiguities can be revealed by critical analysis of the way verbal, visual, and material dimensions of ‘net zero’ commitments and sustainability campaigns work together? At the micro-level, how is environmental responsibility embedded in product packaging, green labelling, and retail environments through colour, typography, material texture, and certification logos? What does the proliferation of ‘eco, organic, and sustainable’ labeling on everyday commodities (food, clothing, cosmetics etc.) indicate about the normalisation of climate language in everyday commerce?
Children’s media and ecological socialisation. How do educational materials, picture books, toys, and games frame the climate crisis for young audiences as individual responsibility, collective action, consumer choice, or adventure narrative? What ideological assumptions about agency (e.g., individual consumer choice vs. collective action) underline these representations, and shape the environmental common sense of future generations?
Screen media and the entertainment industry. How do fictional and documentary screen media navigate the tension between communicating climate messages and the commercial imperatives of their parent companies? How does climate change function as an aesthetic resource or branding attribute in contemporary screen-based media culture? What does this say about the cultural normalisation of ecological disaster?
Climate affect and grassroots resistance. How are climate anxiety, ecological grief articulated in everyday semiotic practices? What semiotic resources do individuals draw on to express climate distress on social media, in protest actions, or through art, and how do these grassroots semiotic practices resist or interact with dominant commodified narratives?
The spatial politics of climate design. How is climate risk and responsibility made visible or invisible in urban and rural spaces? How do flood warning signs, carbon neutral infrastructure, and environmental signage reshape the communicative ecology of place? Whose interests do these interventions serve, and what do they reveal about the unequal distribution of climate risks and responsibilities?
Global circulation and translation of climate meaning. How do climate meanings travel across languages, media systems, and geopolitical contexts? How are the communicative practices of Global South communities translated, commodified, or marginalised when entering internationally circulating climate discourse? What can critical analysis reveal about the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the global governance of climate meaning?
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts should be between 7,000 and 9,000 words (including references) and should follow the Social Semiotics style guidelines. All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.
Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of a maximum of 500 words, together with a short biographical note, to guest editors by 31 August 2026. Abstracts should clearly indicate the empirical material to be analysed, the analytical approach to be employed, and the contribution the paper aims to make to the special issue’s themes.
Key Dates
Abstract submission deadline: 31 August 2026
Notification of abstract decisions: 30 September 2026
Full paper submission deadline: 28 February 2027
Peer review and revision: March-April 2027
Anticipated publication: August 2027
For informal enquiries about the scope and suitability of proposed contributions, please contact the guest editors at changpenghuan@um.edu.mo and monica.colombo@unimib.it
He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Macau, Macao SAR. Prior to that, he was a Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai. His current research focuses on discourses surrounding social media, climate change, Australian populism and LLM Chatbots. His publications appear in international journals and internationally renowned publishers such as Springer, Routledge and Cambridge University Press.
Monica Giancarla Roberta Colombo
She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Cultural Processes and Communication at the Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy). Her research lies at the intersection of discourse studies, political sociology, and communication. Her current research examines political and institutional discourse on resilience and sustainability, exploring how these concepts are framed, legitimized, and mobilized in policy-making and public communication. She has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.