Changing Climates

This project is a corpus-based investigation of discourses around global warming, energy and mobilities in Brazil and Britain. It will contrast talk, text and social activities in two major economies, one in which the notion of global warming is widely accepted (Brazil) and another in which climate change scepticism is increasingly prominent in the public sphere (Britain).


Team:

Principal Investigator: John Urry

Senior Research Associate: Carmen Dayrell


Read the latest updates on this project:

  • Representation of the Sea in the UK Press: Public Awareness of the Oceans (14 December 2021)

    Carmen Dayrell, Basil Germond (Lancaster University) and Celine Germond-Duret (Liverpool John Moores University) Introduction 5th November 2021 was COP26’s Ocean Action Day. The UK Presidency of the conference stressed the need “to take ambitious steps towards ocean health and resilience” in order to contribute to “our fight against climate change”. Ocean sustainability is contingent to citizens’ awareness …

  • CASS Changing Climates project presented at the University of Turin (10 May 2016)

    It was a great honour and pleasure to present CASS Changing Climates project to an engaging audience at the University of Turin last month, on 27th April 2016. This was the 8th symposium on ‘Energy and Power: Social ontology perspectives and energy transitions’ as part of a UNESCO Chair programme in Sustainable Development and Territory …

  • Changing Climates and the Media (4 September 2015)

    The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and the Department of Sociology are pleased to announce a one-day symposium on Changing Climates and the Media taking place at Lancaster University on 21st Sep 2015. This is the end-of-grant event of the CASS project on Changing Climates. The symposium will bring together leading academics from various disciplines, …

  • Welcoming the new members of the Climate Change team (2 October 2014)

    We are delighted to announce that Dr. Marcus Müller from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto from the University of Torino (Italy) have kindly agreed to join CASS Changing Climate project, led by Professor John Urry. They both will have a lot to contribute to the project. Their experience and language skills …

  • New working paper on “Changing Climate and Society: The Surprising Case of Brazil” now available (4 July 2014)

    Why is Brazil unique when it comes to climate change? Brazil is a major emerging economy and it is the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. However, its fossil fuel-based emissions are low by global standards. Brazil has been innovative in developing some relevant low carbon ways of generating energy and pioneered significant transport innovations. It …

  • Changing Climates: Crossing Boundaries (1 April 2014)

    Last Friday (28th), CASS had the pleasure to host a cordial meeting in which researchers from CASS and the University of Bergen got together to discuss about their ongoing research on discourses surrounding climate change. The Norwegian team runs the NTAP project (Networks of Texts and People) which aims to explore the flow of information across …

  • Update on Changing Climates (26 February 2014)

    The Changing Climates project is a corpus-based investigation of discourses around climate change. It aims to examine how climate change has been framed in the media coverage across Britain and Brazil in the past decade. Here, we look at two different scenarios. Recent surveys have shown that climate change is currently considered a high priority …

  • Welcoming new CASS Senior Research Associate: Carmen Dayrell (14 November 2013)

    We are pleased to announce that Dr Carmen Dayrell (c.dayrell@lancaster.ac.uk) has joined the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science as the Senior Research Associate on the Changing Climates project. You can read a bit more about her in her own words, below. My main research interests relate to the use of corpus methodologies to study language …