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Short abstract

Examining the media systems that shape the social construction of crises, this paper employs a mixed-methods approach to explore how plastics pollution is communicatively framed as an urgent problem, what systemic (in)visibilities that framing produces, and what political responses it invites.

Long abstract

Plastic pollution is a stubborn and intensifying environmental concern, oft-characterized as a crisis - such as in the United Nations’ Triple Planetary Crisis framework. Yet framing plastic pollution as a crisis requiring a remedy (cf. Esposito 2017; Patterson et al. 2021) limits our historical and political awareness of the systemic (but not inexorable) nature of the problem. In this paper, I explore how plastic pollution is communicated as a crisis within news media discourses, what this framing makes (in)visible, and what role changing media infrastructures play in bringing about new political dynamics around plastic pollution as a socio-ecological problem. The paper traces the history of plastics from the post-war boom in plastics production to the present day, chronicling their material impacts and corresponding societal understandings. It combines structural topic modeling, a computational method able to tackle large-scale historical corpora, with discourse analysis (Aranda et al. 2021). I outline how plastics have been communicated in news media discourses, taking media infrastructures as a key system in which the plastics crisis is constructed. Although frequently overlooked, media infrastructures form the communicative sociotechnical assemblages that condition how environmental crises come to be culturally and politically understood (Couldry and Hepp 2017). With this focus, I explore what kinds of problem constructions are encouraged by contemporary media infrastructures, and whether framing plastic pollution as an urgent crisis usefully mobilizes crisis management strategies, or rather hides a toxic normalcy from view - a normalcy thereby reproduced.