Chair: Eric Jenkins This panel explores ways that experiential media such as virtual reality (VR) and digital stimulation can contribute to more effective environmental communication practices in a variety of settings.

In this roundtable discussion, panelists explore conceptual interactions between environmental communication, which tends to focus on the micro level and the practices through which actors make sense of sustainability issues, and the governance field, which is concerned with the macro practices of steering society. These two perspectives, which are rarely explicitly combined, are placed in conversation as panelists discuss what we can learn from letting the two fields speak to each other.

Chair: Nicholas Paliewicz The question of how to document the influence of fossil fuel industries on public discourse, policy, politics, and culture is a subject of intense interest. Increasingly, this research is drawn upon to inform political inquiries into fossil fuel manipulation, investigations into specific claims of denial and libel by journalists, legal claims of liability against specific organizations (including Exxon Mobil and the PR companies that enable them) and to document the harassment and misinformation that circulate online. The papers in this panel explore some of the conceptual and methodological questions raised by these developments in the context of practical experiences with the preservation, organization, and analysis of various kinds of evidence of climate deception. Panelists have been involved in creating archives of fossil fuel distortion, generating interview data and organizing historical materials to provide testimony to government investigations into the role of PR in preventing climate action, identifying network patterns of misinformation on social media platforms, filing formal complaints in high profile instances of disinformation by denialist pundits, and assessing how communication and media scholarship on climate communication distortion is drawn upon in libel, denial, and lawsuit decisions including claims of harassment. The forensic and actionable elements of communication and media analysis are now of growing interest as specific instances of misinformation become contested, litigated, subject to platform moderation rules, and offered as precedents for future determinations of misinformation and accountability. In summary, the panel contributes conceptually and methodologically to the growing conversation on climate deception and misinformation.

Chair: Barb Willard This panel includes case studies from Indonesia to Australia to California to the Appalachian Mountains to showcase a variety of approaches to environmental education, with communication as a key component.

Chair: Chris Russill Presentations in this panel explore ways that the credibility of environmental communicators--including scientists and activists--is understood by various audiences and is challenged on social media and elsewhere.

Practitioners and scholars of rhetoric have long acknowledged rhetoric’s capacity not just to express a rhetor’s emotional state but to conjure feelings—to generate what some now call “public feelings,” feelings that can be and often are shared by people who may or may not be closely linked. Working within this tradition, contributors to this panel will demonstrate how ecological feelings are rhetorically generated and sustained, that is, how material-symbolic practices give rise to worlds in which particular feelings become more or less possible.

Chair: Hanna Morris Papers in this panel investigate how environmental organizations--local and international--attempt to define or respond to crisis in various contexts.

Chair: Sheryl Cunningham This panel explores the ways in which mediated images, whether provided by local news coverage or disseminated by environmental advocacy groups, can shape public perception of environmentally-related conditions and events.

All meal vegetarian.

Drop in for an informal chat with the incoming editor of Environmental Communication. All attendees are welcome to ask questions and share feedback.

Chair: Sibo Chen Panel presenters explore dimensions of social media, including origin stories, affordances and limitations of various platforms, with attendant impacts on environmental communication messages.

Chair: Catherine Bruns This panel examines environmental communication in a variety of experiential settings, including the classroom, in person-to-person conversations, and in other local contexts.

Chair: Jennifer Good Young people are now leading the way in climate advocacy around the world. What strategies do they use? How are they perceived by various audiences, including mainstream media? And how do young people receive and interpret various climate-related messages? This panel addresses these questions and more in this emerging area of climate communication research.

Environmental communication research to date has been heavily informed and shaped by western-centric approaches to communication, especially mass and strategic communication. However, other perspectives informed by alternative paradigms and knowledge systems are largely absent from the environmental communication literature. In research and practice, this gap may hinder effective communication that aims to span multiple disciplines, practice spaces, and knowledge systems (i.e., local or Indigenous knowledge) in an effort to address complex and pressing transboundary environmental issues in systems of colonization or other inequities. This roundtable will use a hybrid approach where participants on-site as well as virtually could engage in dialogue. We anticipate that the panel will continue to build a network of scholars interested in collaborating in inter- and transdisciplinary research and identify research questions that could help generate a better understanding of the nature of this issue, for example, networks among the scholars and scholarship, beyond existing reviews or citation analysis. The specific objective of the roundtable discussion panel is to collaboratively develop a proposal for a special issue for the journal Environmental Communication . Facilitating new partnerships and articulating this vision can also support efforts to pursue funding to support authors' submissions to a special issue, especially researchers from underrepresented countries in the field or outside academic institutions.

Chair: Claire Konkes This panel explores a variety of issues pertaining to how individuals use--or avoid--information they receive about environmental issues in face-to-face, mediated, or app-based contexts.

Steve Schwarze published “Environmental Melodrama” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2006. Positive critical response quickly followed. The essay won the 2007 Christine L. Oravec Award for scholarship in environmental communication awarded by the Environmental Communication Division of the National Communication Association. COCE held a forum discussing the essay (2007). The essay has since been extensively cited by scholars and “environmental melodrama” has become a key term in the environmental communication discipline. Seventeen years after its publication and upon the passing of Steve Schwarze, this panel invites scholars who have used his work to revisit the “Environmental Melodrama” in order to explore how the concept has been applied and extended in the field and what it can tell us about current environmental issues and the discipline of environmental communication. The panel addresses the conference theme of “many voices, one planet” by bringing together scholars from different backgrounds and topic areas to reflect on the role of melodrama in their own work, and in seeking to understand how environmental groups and their challengers invoke and adapt melodrama for their own purposes.

Chair: Lucy Richardson This panel continues the robust scholarly conversation pertaining to the use of framing in environmental communication, including case studies as well as broader considerations about the value of this nearly ubiquitous rhetorical device.

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.

In-Person: Lower Drum seating area Sit and chat with Phaedra Pezzullo about the future of our flagship journal.

In-Person: Ballroom B & C A virtual poster session will also open at this time. Both in-person and remote attendees are encouraged to access the virtual session to interact with all poster presenters. All COCE attendees are encouraged to vote for the best poster. The poster that receives the most votes will receive the Top Poster Award. USE THIS LINK TO SUBMIT YOUR VOTE: https://forms.gle/ucqrkESSPDdQYq789 Voting closes on Wednesday, June 7 at 8pm EST. All COCE award winners will be announced at the IECA board meeting Thursday evening and winners will be presented with a certificate (for Top Paper; Top Student Paper; Top Poster; and Top Artistic Entry), so do try to attend.

The presentation, "Conservation Photography as a Way of Knowing" will be delivered by Steven Johnson. Dinner will be banquet-style, vegetarian.