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This Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, funded by the AHRC, investigates how citizens contest climate policy across various online platforms. It aims to build a theory of how such contestation contributes to or undermines democratic knowledge-building. Below is an overview of the project and its outputs so far.
This Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, funded by the AHRC, investigates how citizens contest climate policy across various online platforms. It aims to build a theory of how such contestation contributes to or undermines democratic knowledge-building. Below is an overview of the project and its outputs so far.
Start date: 1 October 2023
End date: 1 October 2025
Funder: AHRC
Primary investigator: Dr Lone Sorensen
Research assistant: Danilo Reuben Matamoros
Grant value: £249,282
Partners and collaborators
Partners and collaborators
Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission (YHCC)
Description
Description
Climate policies are usually founded on and legitimised through political truth claims, but not everyone agrees that they are, in fact, true.
Claims might be about the severity of the climate crisis and evidenced with statistics and scientific models. Alternatively, truth claims may raise concerns about the alarmism of climate scientists who take focus away from people's day-to-day difficulties. Such claims may be evidenced not by quantitative data but testimonies from struggling citizens, or, at times, logical fallacies.
The conditions of the online attention economy attune user practices and algorithms to favour those truth claims that rely on high-activation emotion, identification, provocation and intuitive understanding rather than detailed scientific evidence. In the context of climate change, the types of truth claims performed by those who might be described as climate deniers are more likely to be effective online.
The project explores the political performance of online truth claims surrounding the UK government's Net Zero policy and citizens' engagement with such truth claims through online argumentation. It aims to delineate the boundaries of valid and perverted digital truth claims in a context of influential climate deniers within UK politics.
One aim is to develop a more nuanced model of the distinct elements of truth claims (such as evidence, authority, truthfulness and ways of knowing) than a simple true-false dichotomy implies. In doing so, I seek to appreciate the political conditions of constructing claims and citizens' criteria for evaluating them, especially as truth claims surrounding the UK government's Net Zero policy increasingly affect people's lives and climate denialism potentially becomes more attractive. Such a model will serve as a better basis for understanding the full lifecycle of truth claims from the politician's claim-making through its online mediation to its contestation by citizens (and back again). It thereby supports a second aim of supporting Net Zero policies and the way they are communicated to more effectively speak to the concerns of citizens and secure successful implementation in a context of growing online disruption.
Impact
Impact
The research on climate-related truth claims can inform climate communication policy and strategy by third sector advocates, local authorities and national representatives. I initially collaborated with the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission (YHCC) and involved local authorities to develop recommendations for accountable, transparent and effective online climate communication and public engagement strategies.
Publications and outputs
Publications and outputs
Lone Sorensen, Benjamin Krämer (2024). ‘The shift to authenticity: a framework for analysis of political truth claims’. Communication Theory, https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtae013 (open access)
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