5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The grim reality of global warming is upon us. Yet, the acknowledgement that we, as a species, continue to have a detrimental effect on our planet has not galvanized us into frantic efforts to protect our only home. Our lethargic reaction to global warming leads to fundamental questions. Are we, collectively, aware of the existential threat that global warming poses to the entire planet? Does a logger in a remote village and an industrialist in a metropolis make a connection between their day-to-day actions and the floods or wild fires that ravage their country? Does the school girl in Africa and the school boy in Asia know that they can act to mitigate the drought that ravages their community? Does the leader of a village and a president of a nation feel the urgency to mobilise their people in the face of a looming catastrophe? To answer these questions, this session welcomes evidence-based papers that analyse language and talk around global warming. The papers should be grounded within discourse analysis frameworks. Focus should be on the social, economic and political dimensions of the climate change debate as brought out in language of political leaders, the language of the media, films and documentaries, the language of school textbooks, the language of global climate forums among others. The analysis should problematize the climate change debate by highlighting double speak by various actors, competing framing of the problem, creation of agency, blame attribution, denial of the problem or responsibility and so on.