Conferences and talks

Summary: Sylvia’s PhD work focuses on the visual communication of climate change, specifically how visual media content is produced within newsrooms and the wider news photography network. Sylvia conducted a 4 month newsroom ethnography at one digital-born climate journalism organisation (Carbon Brief), and her research draws from concepts of "organisational culture" to understand the everyday routines and practices that come to determine how the imagery associated with climate change news content comes to exist.

I was accepted to attend the DMI Winter School in January 2023 at the University of Amsterdam. This was an excellent week to learn new skills and work on a project in a small group of academics from around the world specialising in communication and digital methods. I became familiar with tools including Gephi, 4CAT, and ImagePlot.

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I was working on a project called "Tracing trust in a truth-less world. Comparing three scientific controversies on TikTok and Twitter". We mapped networks of hashtags relating to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. 

TITLE: The “messiness” of co-producing research with a non-academic organisation: a one-sided relationship?

ABSTRACT: 

The imagery used in media coverage of climate change affect how the public understand the issue, but research often lacks a deep ethnographic understanding of the processes of news-making. Involving a 4-month ethnography, my research used co-production to investigate the visual communication of climate change at one specialist climate journalist organisation, Carbon Brief. Co-producing research with non-academic organisations has become an increasingly “trendy” and popular topic in recent years, particularly in Geography, but debates remain around its use. Often discussed are the substantive imperatives (improving the quality of the research), and normative imperatives (intrinsic value in terms of democratising science) of co-producing research. In this paper, I draw from my own experiences as an ECR embedded in a non-academic organisation to discuss how these substantive benefits are clear, but there are often various barriers to achieving the normative ideals of co-production so praised in the literature.

An informal sharing of research and ideas from my COP26 imagery project.

ABSTRACT: 

The 2021 Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow was a significant moment in the fight against climate change, and inaccessibility of the event means the public know about the event through the media.

This study aims to identify the visual discourse of COP26 in UK news media, and to understand the role that photographer experiences and photo and wire agencies play in constructing that discourse. I analyse over 1,300 news images of COP26, but also draw from interviews with prominent photographers at the event to understand the news photography network. In particular, I use the case of climate activist Vanessa Nakate being cropped out of an image with Greta Thunberg and Nicola Sturgeon at COP26 to discuss the wider news photography network and the place of photographers within this.

ABSTRACT: see RGS conference above

TITLE: Visual Climate Communication and the Image Bank: A visual turn for climate protest imagery?