Framing Sustainability in Language and Communication

Maida Kosatica is Professor of Urban Semiotics and Semantics in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research interests include semiotic landscapes, multimodal critical discourse analysis, environmental communication and displacement, and discourse of ecosystem services. Sean P. Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research examines how discourse and (social) media shape development and practice within the contexts of the environment and tourism, informed by field research in Myanmar (Burma) and the Arabian Gulf.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Introduction

Framing Sustainability

Maida Kosatica & Sean P. Smith

1. Visual Essay: “Banal Sustainability”

Sean P. Smith

SECTION I: Reframing sustainability in a colonial world

2. Rethinking Sustainability through Indigenous Language Futures

Bernard C. Perley

3. Chronotopes of Sustainability and the Coloniality of Corporate Initiatives

Jessica Pouchet

4. Climate Crisis and Animal Exploitation: Historical Materialism and The Reformulation of Industrial Discourses

Diego L. Forte

SECTION II: The semiotics of sustainability

5. The semiotics of “the unfinished”: The lost highway and other signifiers of unsustainable development

Anders Björkvall & Arlene Archer

6. Creating shared value: A Social Semiotic Analysis of ESG Discourse on Social Media

Esterina Nervino, Karen C. K. Choi & Jiaying Wang

7. Signs of sustainability? The semiotic dimension of urban plants

Laura Imhoff

SECTION III: Communicating sustainability in everyday life

8. Responding to lifestyle discourses in climate conversations

Julia Coombs Fine

9. . Sustainable Architecture Studio Discourse: When the decoupling of communication, intentions, and outcomes presents aspirations for alternative futures

Sherif Goubran

10. Reclaiming Sustainability for the Anthropocene

Gavin Lamb

SECTION IV: Sustainability communication in the arts

11. ‘Sustainability’ in the Arts and Culture Sector: A Discourse Analytic Appreciative Inquiry

Kate Power

12. Climate In the Club: Conveying Sustainable Futures Through Eco Grime and Solarpunk Music

Morgan Sleeper & Jessica Love-Nichols

13. Staying away from Cthulhu rather than Embracing the Cthulhucene: Human and Non-Human Relations in Netflix’s The Sea Beast

Emelie Fälton & Polina Ignatova

Epilogue

14. Seeing Through Sustainability and the Wasteful Rhetorics of (un)knowing

Crispin Thurlow

Index