I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with expertise in climate change media and critical methods of cultural analysis. My research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores questions of power, identity-formation, and meaning-making around climate change. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where I also completed my PhD. I’m also the co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) and an Alumni Affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Media at Risk.
My newest book is titled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025) and reveals how national anxieties following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 have shaped American journalistic and political interpretations of climate change in ways that severely limit how it has come to be known, imagined, and contended with. Looking at climate change reporting across prominent and ideologically diverse U.S. news publications over the past decade, my book traces how news media create an illusion of control in the present through nostalgic and heroic stories of the past. My book identifies a new mode of reactionary politics called “apocalyptic authoritarianism” to describe the post-2016 alignment of historically privileged figures united by a common enemy of the “new” New Left and a shared appeal to fears of “total crisis.” This antidemocratic paradigm portends national and planetary disarray if progressive social and climate justice “warriors” are not controlled at home and if “unruly masses” of climate migrants are not contained abroad. In addition to contending with the implications of apocalyptic authoritarianism, my book also calls for more robust forms of climate journalism and politics capable of facilitating—not impeding—radically democratic responses to climate change.
[Check out recent interviews about my book with Annenberg News here, illiberalism.org here, and Drilled Media here. You can also read an article I wrote for Earth Island Journal here in which I draw upon research from my new book to make the case for how the news media can better navigate Trump 2.0 by learning from mistakes made the first time around.]
My ongoing research primarily focuses on how the causes, risks, and proposed responses to climate change are conceptualized, communicated, and contested across different cultural, political, and social contexts. My newer line of research examines the perception and use of social media among progressive climate justice activists. Here I consider how activists are responding to spikes in online hate speech, reactionary trolling, and the concentrated ownership of digital platforms. Through critical media analyses and qualitative interviews, I’m looking at how progressive climate justice activists are retreating (or not) from big commercialized platforms and co-building alternative online and offline spaces for their movement and collectivities.
My research and writing have been published in various academic journals and popular media outlets including Climatic Change, WIREs Climate Change, Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, Politique Américaine, Places Journal, Reading The Pictures, and Earth Island Journal. I also co-edited the book titled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (Routledge, 2021). My scholarship has been recognized by the Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto, Stuart Hall Award from the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship from the IECA and IAMCR, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association (ICA) and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS).
Education:
PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2021
MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
MSc, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2016
BS, University of California, Berkeley, 2015
Learn more about my work in this faculty spotlight piece here.
Dr. Hanna E. Morris, Ph.D. 