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Short abstract:

We respond to the 'crisis of imagination' in climate change with an innovative analysis of image and text used in both policy and cultural issue spaces on social media. We discuss specific examples of texts and image genres from the dataset and identify wider patterns of convergence and divergence.

Long abstract:

Climate politics appears to be stuck, with the public appetite for tackling climate change not being adequately matched by progress in climate politics. We take this as confirmation of Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) insight that climate change constitutes a ‘crisis of imagination’ in which the work done by science to make climate change visible is yet to be matched by political and cultural efforts. We respond to this crisis with an analysis of how policy and cultural climate issue spaces intersected during the COP28 talks in Dubai, bringing into view ‘pockets of innovation’ in contemporary climate politics (Callon et al.,1983). Using a novel dataset containing social media material related not only to familiar climate change terms (net zero, COP28, climate change) but also cultural movements concerned with environmental justice (veganism, antinatalism), our methodology combines corpus linguistics and digital methods to highlight the changing contours of climate problematisation (Marres and Gerlitz, 2016). We repurpose classic word co-occurrence methods from STS to identify how both text and image work together to bring about new cultural formations of climate change. In the paper, we discuss specific examples of texts and image genres from the dataset and identify wider patterns of convergence and divergence, notably where cultural spaces do (veganism) or do not (antinatalism) intersect with more established policy spaces. We also reflect on the presence, or otherwise, of science and technology within climate politics.