Communication and Climate Change
This panel will be featuring speakers Tyrone Hall and Carmen Victor from the Communication Studies Department.
Carmen Victor is a PhD candidate in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture at York/Ryerson Universities. Her writing on contested landscapes, installation art, cinemas of the circumpolar North, and time-based and experimental film and media has appeared in Prefix Photo, Public Journal, Ciel Variable, Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics, Culture Machine, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, The Journal of Science Fiction Film and Televisionand TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, as well as in edited volumes published by Pleasure Dome (Toronto) and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (Sunderland, U.K.). She teaches in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University.
She will be discussing how the question as to whether catastrophic climate disaster is going to occur is no longer valid but, rather, the question is when will it occur. The recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report affirms that we only have 12 years to implement drastic changes to mitigate extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty caused by an increase in the Earth’s warming beyond 1.5 C. In the face of political stagnation and as students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, we often wonder how to address climate change. Victor discusses how the imaginary has been a common horizon that grapples with climate catastrophe as well as developing upon the idea of a “visual culture of the Anthropocene” to unpack subjectivities of the (so-called) Anthropocene.
Hall is a Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate focused on environmental communication. His ambitious global dissertation project aims to optimize climate change communication through field work in 17 traditional and indigenous communities from across Fiji, South India and Belize. He has nearly a decade of experience managing environmental communications in the Caribbean, including three years as the lead communications specialist for the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre. He managed the communications portfolio for 19 climate change projects across a dozen Caribbean islands, Belize, Guyana and Suriname. Hall provides strategic communication services, research-based communication support and partnership development. He is adept at distilling complex scientific information for varied audiences at both regional and international levels, including policy briefs, knowledge briefs, impactful videos and multimodal campaigns. He honed these skills while working with diverse international project teams, including as the lead research and outreach associate for the flagship USAID Global Broadband & Innovations Programme. He also routinely reviews climate change communication and ICT for agriculture and youth employability initiatives in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific.
He will be discussing how contemporary society is confounded by the unprecedented nature of current and projected climate change and variability. While there is broad technical and scientific consensus for urgent changes in global economic and energy systems, policy-makers have struggled for over a generation to effectively mobilize the scale of agency and action needed to support these actions. The belated adoption of a common “rule book” on the eve of the implementation of the Paris Agreement is the latest indication of the action gap. What does a sociocultural perspective offer for improving the communicability of climate action during the enactment of systemic climate actions? How should the sociocultural be leveraged and what are its limits?
This panel will be held on Thursday, Jan. 31 in the Victor Phillip Dahdaleh building, Room 3060.
