Youth Engagement with Climate Crisis through an Immersive Documentary

An interactive documentary titled This Is Climate Change (2018) will be analyzed as an example of “eco-culture” and read by the university students at Siegen University in Germany from the perspective of “eco-affects” (Adrian and Lopez, 2024). The students will be asked to read and engage with this chosen interactive documentary, mainly based on whether interactivity leads to a more engaged or well-informed audience (Brannon et al. 2022: 335). Following Villani et al. (2009. p. 339 quoted in Brannon et al. 2022), both formal characteristics and content will be addressed. The students will be asked to analyze the documentary from content and stylistic characteristics, including whether it informed them, increased their empathy, and if so, how, or if not, why. They will be asked whether they want to continue discovering the issue more, and if yes, how. The research process will function as a “climate literacy/climate change literacy” (Azevedo and Marques 2017, 4). This is Climate Change (2018) is a four-part series of short 360° immersive VR films. It was produced by Participant Media and Condition One, and featured on Within. They are titled Fire (California wildfires of 2017), Famine (Somalia), Feast (Amazonian rainforest in Brazil), and Melting Ice (icebergs in Greenland). Our research takes a novel approach to climate communication, shifting the focus from traditional textual analysis of print media to the newer multi-modal forms. As Brereton (2019) points out, there has been a historical under-sampling or examination of climate change attitudes and beliefs amongst undergraduate groups of students. By addressing these gaps, our research aims to make a significant contribution to the field of climate communication.The presentation hopes to contribute to engaged communication scholarship on environmental justice (Chad, 2019) and transformative communication scholarship (Brüggemann et. al, 2023).