Título
Science and rhetoric in a globalizing public sphere: mediating systems of climate change knowledge and action
Autor
Üzelgün, Mehmet Ali
Resumo
en
People’s knowledge and beliefs about intangible problems such as climate change rely
heavily on mediated discourses of science and policy. This thesis employs a dialogical and
rhetorical approach to social representations to examine how two mediating systems -the
mainstream press and environmental non-governmental organizations- represent and
reconstruct climate change. The first empirical chapter focuses on the articles published over
one decade (1999-2009) in the mainstream Turkish press. The analyses reveal that climate
change emerged as a matter of public concern after 2005 in relation to the ecological
extremes faced with in the country (Study 1), and that high levels of dramatization in the
press in this national context were achieved by drawing on these local impacts and dire risks,
and divorcing them from the global and political aspects of the problem (Study 2). Through
this separation between the global and the local, and by reconstructing an image of solid
scientific knowledge, a hegemonic representation of a serious ‘human-caused threat’ was
established, without identifying by whom or how it would be dealt with (Study 3). The
second empirical chapter focuses on the interviews (N=22) with non-governmental actors
involved in climate change information and policy in Turkey and Portugal. The analyses
show that when responding to less reflexive tasks, the non-governmental experts also
confine themselves to the hegemonic representation: ‘a human caused problem’ (Study 4).
Yet, in their reflexive representations, they focus more on the solutions to the problem,
bringing into play, contrasting and reconciling two more representations: ‘an environmental
problem’ and ‘a socio-political problem’ (Study 5). It is shown how these representations
interfere with each other in two argumentative contexts, in which the interviewees organized
the points of agreement and disagreement in a way which makes their views more acceptable
to others (Study 6). Overall, these studies show that, in pursuit of persuasion, the mainstream
press mainly resorted to a unifying threat and to emotions, whereas the non-governmental
actors resorted to negotiation and reconciliation of divergent views.