Spotlight: Voice(lessness): Environmental Communication on the African Continent

This year’s COCE theme calls attention to “many voices vying to lead, as well as those struggling to be heard” in our collective struggle to secure a future for our planet. There’s arguably no other place where these concerns are more timely and prescient than on the African continent. Across the continent, environmental pressures are felt more immediately than elsewhere on the planet. It is therefore not easy to isolate the environment and environmental concerns from communication in many contexts in Africa. Surprisingly, Environmental Communication, which is defined as the study of “the pragmatic and constitutive modes of expression—the naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiating—of our ecological relationships in the world, including those with nonhuman systems, elements, and species” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2022), though vibrant and growing in Europe, North America, and Asia has seldom included studies of African communication, and even less frequently scholarship from African perspectives. It is also true that communication scholarship on and from the continent, though often dealing with environmental concerns, very rarely features the methods, orientations, and concerns that have defined Environmental Communication to date. This panel gathers scholars with interests in African Communication Studies and Environmental Communication to consider how disciplinary mechanisms and practices in both environmental communication and African Communication Studies have functioned as infrastructures of obscurity and how we might plant seeds to generate more environmental communication research in, about, and from Africa in the future.

Additional resources can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UNA7BKPPJCIWfIGtwaug93KcwFaoqKCekqRIOQGG4hg/edit?usp=drivesdk