Environmental activism as counter-hegemony? A comparative critical discourse analysis of self-representations of radical environmental organisations

ABSTRACT

Environmental activism involves subverting dominant cultural practices in an aim to raise awareness not only of local issues, but increasingly of global environmental challenges. However, to successfully mobilise target publics, activists need to self-represent in ways that do not compromise their legitimacy. This study reports on a critical discourse analysis of online manifestos of three environmental organisations: Extinction Rebellion (UK), Deep Green Resistance (US), Pracownia na Rzecz Wszystkich Istot (Poland). It offers a comparison of linguistic, rhetorical and visual resources recruited to promote the opposition to selected dominant values as a desirable, even necessary, orientation in a climate emergency.

Działalność organizacji ekologicznych wiąże się z odrzucaniem zapewnień o wystarczających działaniach ochronnych i kwestionowaniem dominujących praktyk kulturowych. Jednak aby skutecznie mobilizować opinię publiczną, ruchy ekologiczne muszą prezentować się jako wiarygodne i akceptowalne, choć ich dążenia kwestionują wartości kultury hegemonicznej. Niniejsze studium to analiza porównawcza manifestów trzech radykalnych organizacji ekologicznych, Extinction Rebellion (UK) Deep Green Resistance (USA) i Pracowni na Rzecz Wszystkich Istot (Polska), pod kątem językowych, retorycznych i wizualnych strategii prezentacji wartości opozycyjnych do głównego nurtu kultury w kontekście kryzysu klimatycznego. Poprzez analizę porównawczą, niniejsze studium ukazuje niuanse autoprezentacji, identyfikacji kulturowej i legitymizacji ruchów ekologicznych w różnych kontekstach kulturowych.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmentalism
• counter-hegemony
• self-representation
• legitimacy
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, the organisations studied here all make a reference to deep ecology (Naess, 1989) as their guiding principle, but one should not be oblivious to the variety of motivations or philosophies, particularly when it comes to ecological stances of land/water rights movements, indigenous/farmer movements, climate justice, or gender/youth oriented movements. As this study is focused on selected online manifestoes, the theoretical frameworks and literatures reviewed here are the ones that directly feed into analysis. A more in-depth overview of recent scholarship within environmental humanities is beyond the scope of this empirical study.

2 Including increasingly recognised posthuman, non-human, more-than human, and materialist/realist scholarly perspectives.

3 https://extinctionrebellion.uk/; https://deepgreenresistance.org/; https://pracownia.org.pl/

4 Since the material on the PRWI website is in Polish, the word count refers to Polish language version, but all presented examples are translated by the author using literal equivalence.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska

Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Ph.D, Dr Litt., is Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Opole, Poland, and Head of Department of English Language as well as Senior Research Fellow at Faculty of Creative Industries, VGTU, Lithuania. She specialises in critical (multimodal) discourse analysis. She has published articles and chapters on pragma-linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic properties of journalistic, scientific and political discourse, methodology of critical discourse analysis and media literacy. She authored a monograph and co-edited five volumes on cultural and rhetorical aspects of mediated communication. She co-edits the international open access journal Res Rhetorica (a journal of the Polish Rhetoric Society).