Discourse and Sustainability

The Seminar Series "Discourse and Sustainability" is an international forum for presenting and discussing new, cutting edge, research on discourse and issues of sustainability, environment, climate change and ecology.

But don't forget to join this group by login in/ joining the DiscourseNet page, and pressing "join group" so you get future updates too!

Next Talk

20 November 2026 (12 noon-1 pm UK time):Anjali Venketram and Hannah Teresa, Panel Discussion: Stories We Live By - Navigating the hidden and transparent climate change narratives in Singapore, Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/79e70500-e613-4e18-8ea9-5c71b9e8020b@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8

Singapore calls itself “the Garden City” which is a moniker that shapes how the city sees its own relationship with nature. But names and popular narratives are never neutral: they carry assumptions about what may count as “green”, “sustainable”, or “resilient,” and about who gets to decide which is which. This panel will bring together authors of Critical Ecolinguistics Within Singapore, “the Garden City”, who utilized ecolinguistics – or the study of how discourses construct our relationship with nature – as a method for reading Singapore’s narratives, treating physical locations along with policy documents and everyday speech as texts that construct our understanding of human-nature relationships in the city.

The authors will offer some insight into the destructive, ambivalent, and negative discourses that exist in Singapore, and the physical locations and narratives that these discourses are deeply embedded into. Through cases including Chek Jawa, Bukit Brown, and Singapore’s park connectors and green spaces, the authors trace how narratives dictating the maintenance of these spaces shape our understandings of conservation, development, and climate adaptation, and what happens when the stories cities tell about themselves outpace the changes on the ground. This panel will offer a critical lens to investigate the stories we tell ourselves about our cities, and the underestimated impact of language on climate action.

Importantly, these cases remain highly relevant to Singapore’s future. As the city pursues land reclamation, the development of offshore islands through the merging of smaller islands, and plans for its forests, the narratives examined in our book continue to shape how these futures are imagined and justified. From the future of Singapore’s smaller islands to questions surrounding spaces such as Maju Forest, these ongoing debates demonstrate the continuing tension between development, and ecomodernity.

By connecting the narratives examined in the book to Singapore’s current and future plans, this panel asks how ecolinguistics can help us critically examine not only the city we have built, but the city we are continuing to imagine, and the underestimated impact of language on climate action.

Programme for 2026-27

22 January 2027  (12 noon-1 pm UK time): READING GROUP: Naess (1995) - The shallow and the long range , Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/b45f5fa2-e565-40c2-8500-3b87be1a6f5e@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8 

19 February 2027 (12 noon-1 pm UK time): Franzisca Weder (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Sustainability as Discursive Guidepost for Creating Transformative Agency in Professional Communication Education , Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/d1a528dc-8362-4183-8ee1-1560ac506eca@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8

19 March 2027 (12 noon-1 pm UK time): Kjersti Fløttum (University of Bergen), title tbc Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/4d000bd0-c546-493a-9e67-a651377203f6@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8

23 April 2027 (12 noon-1 pm UK time): READING GROUP: Remling 2018 Depoliticizing adaptation, Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/d59d94e5-4dab-4080-95d7-f210f992ac98@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8

21 May 2027 (12 noon-1 pm UK time): Sreeja Nair and Nina Venkataraman (National University of Singapore)The Sentence and the Instrument. Two Disciplines Read Sustainability Against Each Other.Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/08bfe775-b125-4344-8376-203d001aa56d@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8

18 June 2027 (12 noon-1 pm UK time): READING Group, Title TBC, Please register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/06fe28fb-d881-4fd0-a566-1a648da50251@4a5378f9-29f4-4d3e-be89-669d03ada9d8

Previous Talks

16 October 2026 (12 noon-1 pm UK time): Nina Venkataraman (National University of Singapore), Sustaining What, Erasing Whom? Climate-Altered Bodies and the Burden of Adaptation,

29 May 2026 (1-2 UK pm time): Salla-Riikka Kuusalu (University of Turku), Linguistic constructions of clearcutting in an online forum:  Learning from polarised views on forestry and forest conservation in Finland

20 March 2026 (1-2 UK pm time): Stephan Pühringer and Lukas Bäuerle Johannes (Kepler Universität Linz) , Socio-Ecological Transformation (SET) and Economic Reasoning (ER): A conceptual framework to assess the defining relationship of our times, catch up here: https://youtu.be/9PzJY5s1iNI

20 February 2026 (1-2 UK pm time): Matteo Fuoli (University of Birmingham), The language of net zero: A corpus-assisted analysis of corporate climate pledges, catch up here:https://youtu.be/COwluKfSyow

23 January 2026 (1-2 UK pm time): Teresa Fidélis (University of Aveiro), One Concert, Multiple Tunes: Evidence from the Circular Economy Narratives Across EU Member States’ Action Plans, catch up here: https://youtu.be/pyXc_NB8Sgc

21 November 2025 (1-2 pm UK time): Gerard O'Grady (University of Cardiff), Degrowth in the UK press: covert climate change denial and techno optimism, catch up here: https://youtu.be/aZ_PA1j36GY

23 May 2025 (1-2 UK pm time): Arran Stibbe (University of Gloucestershire, UK), The emerging discourse of the bioeconomy

21 March 2025 (1-2 UK pm time):Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska (University of Opole, Poland), Imagining sustainable futures: Critical multimodal analyses of policy discourse, activist discourse and science popularization discourse  - catch up here: https://youtu.be/otiXeOlsmzY

21 February 2025 (1-2 pm UK time): Katherine E. Russo (Università degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale, Italy): Negative Solidarity in Environmental Crisis Contexts: A Corpus-based Online News and Social Media Critical Discourse Analysis of the Australian Black Summer. - catch up here: https://youtu.be/hwrpkT4VLeU

24 January 2025 (1-2 pm UK time): Peter Mayeso Jiyajiya (University of Glasgow, UK): Recounting The Socio-Structural Realities in NGO-Community Engagement and their Implications On Sustainability in Malawi: The Researcher’s Experience,- catch up here: https://youtu.be/UB1neI9TqC8

15 November (1-2 pm UK time): Anders Horsbøl and Anne Grethe Julius Pedersen (Aalborg Universitet, Denmark): Reorganising citizen participation in green energy transition: first insights from an ongoing study of municipality, civil society and industry discourses in a Danish context., Catch up here: https://youtu.be/PX11yg6jz6g

Programme Summer Term 2024

9th February 2024, 11 am UK time (note the different time): Rescheduled talk, Ben Clarke (University of Gothenburg) Wanting for a better climate of discussion on the environment: Patterns of impoliteness, transitivity and Engagement in online newsreader comments that receive uncivil replies - catch up here: https://youtu.be/4oAxX0OCdco

16th February 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Jonathan Joseph (University of Bristol): Resilience, sustainability and the crisis of the Liberal International Order - catch up here: https://youtu.be/0NQniwwGZR4

15th March 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Kelsey Campolong (Ulster University): Neoliberalism in the Glasgow Climate Pact: Interdiscursivity and Faux-Sustainability at COP26  - catch up here: https://youtu.be/4DJsghVbWBk

19th April 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Robert Poole (University of Alabama): Investigating ecological change and climate crisis through diachronic corpus-assisted ecolinguistics - catch up here: https://youtu.be/Tz3ilma3qWY

17th May 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Nicolina Montesano Montessori (HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht): Towards a systemic, social ecological justice: ways forward for Critical Policy Discourse Analysis. catch up here: https://youtu.be/mpZw_opqY0g

7th June 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Bernhard Forchtner (University of Leicester): Sustainability and the far right? The case of degrowth’

--------

The programme Winter Term 2023-2024:

20 October 2023, 12noon-1pm (note the different time) John Dryzek (University of Canberra) 'The Rise (and Fall?) of Grey Radicalism'

17 November 2023, 1-2pm, Tom Bartlett (University of Glasgow),  Just Transitions to sustainable practice - Is there a role for discourse analysts?

15 December 2023, 1-2pm, Anabella Carvalho (University of Minho), Political imaginaries and climate change

****POSTPONED**** Ben Clarke, (Göteborgs universitet), TBC