Several studies have found that relational climate conversations can be an effective method of increasing conversational participants’ concern about the climate crisis and encouraging them to take collective action. However, little work has yet examined how such conversations are practiced by climate activists, a group with expertise in relational organizing. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews with climate activists across the USA, this analysis finds that activists frequently have climate conversations with friends and family, most of whom are politically progressive and somewhat to very concerned about the climate crisis. These findings might seem to suggest that climate activists only have climate conversations with like-minded others, producing an echo chamber effect that could entrench the political polarization of the issue. However, climate activists report strategic reasons for choosing like-minded audiences, such as personal response efficacy. Additionally, they report that one of their primary conversational goals is to move people who are already concerned about the climate crisis to take collective action in accordance with values of climate justice. The results identify obstacles to collective climate action even among concerned audiences and suggest that relational climate conversations can be useful in overcoming these obstacles. Graphical Abstract
This essay stems from our growing concern about the carbon intensity of academia, and of conferencing as an epitome of this. Face-to-face conferencing is widely recognised as both unsustainable and inequitable. Against this backdrop, digital conferencing (online only, or in hybrid form) offers a viable alternative. However, shifting to digital forms of conferencing does not automatically bring about equity. Drawing on white papers, academic discussions and results from a PollEverywhere survey, this essay explores issues of sustainability and equity across modes of face-to-face and digital conferencing, with the aim of charting a path towards more sustainable and accessible digital practises for a diverse community of linguists.
This article examines the phenomenon of anti-Trump witchcraft, popularized by Michael Hughes's viral 2017 ritual ("A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him"), as an instance of register circulation and ultimately register synthesis. Drawing on a digital ethnography of the #MagicResistance movement, including videotaped rituals and interviews with practitioners, the analysis finds that practitioners use the affordance of register incongruity in mediatized online contexts to publicly intertwine the language of American witchcraft with political stance-taking, disseminating indexical links between witchcraft and leftist political orientations. Practitioners variously characterize the language of #MagicResistance rituals as a mismatch between or a synthesis of two registers, demonstrating that register (in)congruity is interactionally constructed rather than prediscursive. Furthermore, practitioners emphasize the cathartic and empowering effects of ritual practice, showing how register circulation-often analyzed at the macrosocial level-manifests in relation to microsocial agency and affect. [sociolinguistics, mediatization, register, ritual language, political language]
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