Over the years, communication scholars have used multiple methods to research and analyse climate change discourses. In the advent of new media technologies, climate change communication and discourses have spanned from the traditional modes of communication such as the radio, print and television to emerging platforms including the social media. This has transformed the ways audiences encode and interpret issues revolving around climate change. In addition, the emergence of social media technologies allows researchers to analyse data on the dynamics of climate change debates with unprecedented breadth and scale. These platforms have expanded the research areas for studying changing patterns in interpersonal and institutional communication on climate change. At the same time this development has brought new methodological challenges and opportunities for studying content, context and climate change representations.
This session is aimed at stimulating innovative investigations into the conceptual and methodological challenges and or opportunities of climate change communication research in the emergent new media digital technologies and directions for future researchers from an African perspective. Key words: climate change; communication; research; digital research. Africa type of papers for the session should be around but not limited to: comparing methods for analysing climate change discourses; methods for analysing the spatial dimension of land use in African social-political environments; epistemological challenges and ethical dilemmas in researching climate change communication in the digital era; climate change in the press, visual/textual analyses; semiotics and climate change communication; media framing, agenda-setting and climate change; qualitative/quantitative studies of climate change perception among African communities; media portrayal of climate change: longitudinal or case studies; social media use and climate change protests; climate change engagement in the digital era; corpus studies on climate change communication; meta-discourses on climate change communication; new media climate change discourses.