Popular Climate Science and Painless Consumer Choices: Communicating Climate Change in the Hot Pink Flamingos Exhibit, Monterey Bay Aquarium, California
Abstract
Using critical discourse analysis, we examine the communicative potential of science centers to engage the public in climate change science. Drawing on a theoretical framework combining climate change engagement and communication, science centers as sites of engagement and communication, ecological citizenship, and insights from social cognitive theory, our analysis shows that along with popularizing climate science and making it accessible to the general public, the Hot Pink Flamingos exhibit prioritized individual, marketplace-based action on climate change over solutions requiring large-scale social change or collective action. Responsibility for climate change was individualized, and the political realm was mostly reduced to lifestyle choices.
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Biographies
Merav Katz-Kimchi (PhD, Bar Ilan University, Israel) is a lecturer at the Department of Communication in Ben Gurion University and the Porter School of Environmental Studies in Tel Aviv University. She has published in the fields of history of communication, science communication, and environmental communication.
Lucy Atkinson (PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison) is an assistant professor in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research looks at the role environmental communication, particularly advertising, plays in connecting individuals’ political and consumer orientations.
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Article first published online: October 30, 2014
Issue published: December 2014
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Published online: October 30, 2014
Issue published: December 2014
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