The fourth session of the Advanced Studies Seminar – Conference Series will take place on January 13, with Anabela Carvalho (University of Minho). The theme will be Communication, Governance and Imaginaries on Climate Change. The event will take place in the Maria de Sousa Room at ICS-ULisboa, starting at 10:30 a.m. See the full schedule of this seminar series.

Over the past few decades, despite an increasingly dire outlook, pathways to address climate change have been largely constrained within the logic of market economics, which has proven inadequate. Dominant discourses have legitimised and naturalised specific policy options, facilitating their institutionalisation and material expansion while simultaneously narrowing the horizon of possibilities. Ecological modernisation and the green economy, for example, frame climate change as a matter of commodification and technocratic management, thereby obscuring structural and power-related drivers and reinforcing neoliberal economic assumptions. These perspectives have been amplified by political elites and widely reproduced across mainstream media. At the same time, strategies of denialism and evasion—particularly from fossil fuel corporations—have worked to appropriate the debate and delay transformative action. Together, these dynamics have fostered what may be described as a post-political deadlock, in which hegemonic claims that “there is no alternative” foreclose democratic contestation. In a context of growing inequalities and aggravated environmental injustices, feelings of political powerlessness and fatalism among citizens create fertile ground for authoritarian and populist tendencies. This seminar will critically examine these discursive formations while also exploring alternative sociotechnical and political imaginaries that could open possibilities for social transformation and the redemocratisation of climate politics.

Anabela Carvalho (PhD, University College London) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Minho. She has been Visiting Scholar/Professor at Aalborg University (2009), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2009), University of Hamburg (2010), Wageningen University (2013), University of Antwerp (2013), and Linköping University (2017), and other universities. She has extensive research experience in environmental and science communication, particularly climate change communication. Her recent work has focused on citizens’ engagement with and political imaginaries of climate change.