Research

Ongoing Research

1. The Business of Influence

With funding from the Climate Social Science Network, I’m conducting a two-year study (2021-2023) on the networks, narratives and strategies used by industrial groups to promote action (or lack of action) around climate change. How do these groups form, design their campaigns, use media systems, and impact collective decision-making? How does legitimacy get created and maintained in different environments?

2. A Strategic Nature

With Maria I. Espinoza, I wrote a book called A Strategic Nature for Oxford University Press. The book takes a critical look at the history of professional communication in the United States, with a focus on how public concern about the environment was filtered through the growing public relations industry. The basic premise of this book is that it is not possible to understand the role of the environment in our everyday lives without understanding how something called “the environment” has been invented and communicated to us throughout our lives. To tell this story properly requires a careful account of the evolution of the institutions, norms and movements that have pushed environmental concerns to the fore of public opinion and political action. But it also demands an examination of the simultaneous evolution of professional communicators and the formation of their institutions, norms and movements. Without this piece of the puzzle, we miss crucial ways that struggles are won, resources allocated, and beliefs fostered about environmental problems.

3. Public Communication in a Promotional Culture

One of the most pressing questions media scholars face is how to reckon with the ways that private media companies take users’ personal data as a proxy for public life; and with what consequences for public knowledge. I’ve been trying to answer this question in a variety of ways. I have a short piece here on the decline of the advertising industry and its consequences for news organizations; another one on brands and the pandemic; and a third on how anxieties about the colonization of big data lead us to forget about all the ways data fails to recognize us. With Maria I. Espinoza, I also have an article out on corporate uses of big data for climate action.