Show simple item record

dc.contributor.authorMartin, Matthieu
dc.date.accessioned2021-08-26 16:08:21 (GMT)
dc.date.available2021-08-26 16:08:21 (GMT)
dc.date.issued2021-08-26
dc.date.submitted2021-08-12
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/17268
dc.description.abstractAnalyzing how climate change is situated in ‘discourse,’ the socially constituted and constitutive use of language, can tell a great deal about how the human subject sees itself in relation to nature and what problematic elements of the social realities it may consequently reproduce. The discourse analyzed here in a corpus of five publications, two Canadian, one German, and two EU, more precisely exemplifies a discourse of “ecological modernisation” which Jänicke (2008) defines as “systematic eco-innovation and its diffusion” (p. 557). In other words, it is the techno-fix approach of creating advanced technology to solve ecological problems. Two research questions have guided the inquiry: first, how does the way in which Canadian, German, & EU political elites address climate change reflect human beings’ relation to nature? Second, what social and ecological reality may this kind of discourse and its corresponding ethical claims encourage and/or continue to constitute? Drawing from Fairclough’s (2015) critical discourse analytical methods as well as elements from Stibbe’s (2021) ecolinguistic framework, the analysis is organized according to five primary cognitive discourse structures: metaphor, framing, evaluation, salience & erasure. It is shown that the discourse portrays responses to climate change as a wartime journey toward an attainable destination against the conceptualized opponent of “climate change.” Moreover, the corpus discourse frames action and nature through a capitalist lens and prioritizes economic growth and technological advancement while discursively erasing elements of the non-human world. It is argued that the ethically intertwined discourse of ecological modernisation as represented in the corpus promotes a social reality that is ecologically ambivalent, appearing at face value to reconcile environmental problems but with a technological and discursive approach which nonetheless reinforces the exploitative relationship between industrial human society and nature.en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity of Waterlooen
dc.subjectdiscourse analysisen
dc.subjectecolinguisticsen
dc.subjectecological modernisationen
dc.subjectcanadianen
dc.subjectgermanen
dc.subjecteuropeanen
dc.subjectclimate changeen
dc.subjecttechno-fixen
dc.titleEcological modernisation? An ecolinguistic analysis of German, Canadian and European techno-fix approaches to climate change.en
dc.typeMaster Thesisen
dc.pendingfalse
uws-etd.degree.departmentGermanic and Slavic Studiesen
uws-etd.degree.disciplineGerman (German Studies, Intercultural)en
uws-etd.degree.grantorUniversity of Waterlooen
uws-etd.degreeMaster of Artsen
uws-etd.embargo.terms0en
uws.contributor.advisorSchmenk, Barbara
uws.contributor.affiliation1Faculty of Artsen
uws.published.cityWaterlooen
uws.published.countryCanadaen
uws.published.provinceOntarioen
uws.typeOfResourceTexten
uws.peerReviewStatusUnrevieweden
uws.scholarLevelGraduateen


Files in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record


UWSpace

University of Waterloo Library
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4883

All items in UWSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved.

DSpace software

Service outages