I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with research interests in climate change media and communication, culture and climate politics, transnational climate movements, and authoritarianism and the climate crisis. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, I’m working on a book entitled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power. I’m also the co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) headquartered at Brown University.
My current work explores two major areas of inquiry: (1) the production of climate discourse and knowledge, where I examine how the causes, risks, and proposed responses to the climate crisis are conceptualized and communicated across different cultural contexts, and (2) the emergence of transnational climate movements, where I examine how transnational coalitions of climate activists resist, negotiate, and contest exclusionary regimes of governance and power. I am specifically interested in how eco-socialist, Indigenous, and youth-led climate justice movements leverage and combine traditional and digital technologies, platforms, and strategies to produce media and organize across borders. Through media analyses and ethnographic interviews with activists, I am tracing how, why, and where radical climate counter-discourses are forming and with what impact on climate policymaking and politics.
My research and writing have been published in various academic journals and popular media outlets including Environmental Communication, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, Politique Américaine, Places Journal, Reading The Pictures, and Earth Island Journal. I also co-edited the book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time. My scholarship has been recognized by the 2021 IAMCR Stuart Hall Award, New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences.
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
Hanna E. Morris, Ph.D. 