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How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts

How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts Candis Callison Duke University Press, 2014

“In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change.”

For sale via Duke University Press

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.

Candis Callison
Written by
Candis Callison

Candis Callison is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She is the author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford University Press, 2020). Candis is a citizen of the Tahltan Nation (an Indigenous people located in what is now known as Northern British Columbia), an award-winning former journalist, a Trudeau Foundation Fellow, a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a regular contributor to the podcast, Media Indigena. She holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. In 2018, Candis gave the keynote address for MIT's Investiture of Doctoral Hoods. You can find her on Twitter @candiscallison.

Thesis: A Digital Assemblage: Diagramming the Social Realities of the Stikine River Watershed

Candis Callison Written by Candis Callison