June 30th, 2023
At the General Assembly of RaAM 16, it was announced that Elise Stickles and Schuyler Laparle were awarded a Building Bridges Fund grant. This award will support an interdisciplinary hybrid conference on climate communication, to be held jointly at UBC and the University of Tilburg, in fall of 2024. Researchers, activists, and policy makers are moving away from a binary, “doomist vs. solutionist” model, towards one of climate justice. Simultaneously, linguists and other metaphor researchers are increasingly interested in the contributions metaphor analysis can make to developing more effective climate communications. Some models may inadvertently invoke feelings of doomism or guilt – neither of which are useful for motivating individuals to action. Cognitive linguistics, with its understanding of how metaphors and frames guide reasoning, can help. Our conference will bring together metaphor analysts and others in academia who focus on the language of climate change with journalists and activists.