Online talk: "An Ecolinguistic Crisis of Climate in the Caribbean"

Eva Bauer will give a talk at Université de Lille within their montly series “Séminare des linguistes” (more information on the series, here). 

Abstract:

The climate crisis is one of the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century, with small island developing states (SIDS), such as those in the Caribbean, being among the most vulnerable to its impacts. Rising sea levels, intensifying hurricanes, and biodiversity loss endanger their environments, economies, and cultural identities, despite these nations contributing minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions (cf. Thomas et al., 2020). Yet, while the physical and economic impacts of the climate crisis in the region have been widely studied, considerably less attention has been given to how the crisis is communicated, represented and understood through language (cf. Forte, 2024). Situated within the field of ecolinguistics (cf. Steffensen, 2025), this study investigates how the climate crisis is represented in media discourse in three English-speaking Caribbean nations: The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. It combines ecolinguistic theory with corpus-assisted ecological discourse analysis (CADA) to examine the linguistic strategies used in climate crisis reporting across six leading newspaper outlets (cf. Poole, 2022). Ultimately, this study seeks to address a critical gap in ecolinguistic scholarship, which has traditionally focused on Western contexts, by applying its principles to an underexplored and highly affected region.