D4: 'Open' and 'Closed' Engagement with Emotions

Emotions are a fundamental component of environmental communication. However, in both practice and scholarship there seems to be a tension between a perspective that sees the role of communication as strategically steering and shaping specific emotional reactions, and an interpretation that encourages more open, diverse, and mutual emotional expressions. Environmental communication strategies often engage in metadiscourses that encourage the construction of messages in a way that evokes certain feelings in their recipients: Messages that aim to induce hope, fear, concern, anger, optimism, or motivation to act. By contrast, metadiscourses of communication related to more participatory and dialogue-oriented approaches see the role of environmental communication as the creation of arenas where participants can share and reflect upon their feelings in relation to an uncertain and conflict-ridden future, without attempting to steer these feelings. Other forms of environmental communication, e.g., in contemporary arts, aim to create spaces and places for people to feel different emotions, maybe in strong and unexpected ways, while leaving the interpretation of these feelings quite open.

This spectrum of metadiscursive approaches, and the tensions between them, are important to recognise in the professional practice of strategic environmental communication since a broad, reflexive repertoire can avoid standardized strategic communication procedures being reproduced.

In this roundtable panel discussion, panelists explore these different metadiscourses of ’open’ and ’closed’ engagement with emotions and reflect on their implications for communication processes and practices.