Poster

Sustainability Stories

Sustainability Stories: Evaluating the UK creative industry and the communication of sustainability

The media are playing an increasingly important role in communicating climate change and other sustainability issues facing the planet. Example media content include flagship TV programmes, such as David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series, and the BBC’s Climate Chaos season, to radio and podcast broadcasts, such as The Climate Question and How to Save a Planet. More recently, the creative sector have applied their unique skills and capabilities to the theme of sustainability. The Green Planet AR Experience running in London in February and March 2022 uses augmented reality technologies to give audiences an immersive and digitally dynamic perspective of the natural world.

The proliferation of sustainability media content has become a topic of interest for the research community. Drawing on various academic disciplines and perspectives, including communication studies, cognitive psychology and visual perception studies, researchers have sought to understand what makes effective communication on sustainability topics, and how and why it can make a positive impact (Robertson, 2018). Despite the growing level of academic interest, research to date has tended to focus on mainstream media (e.g. TV, radio) and less on diverse methods developing within the creative industry. Questions remain on the alternate creative routes for communicating sustainability discourses to various audiences, the context in which to tell the stories, and the resources and education that might be required.

In this project, we bring together academic expertise in market economies and firms from York St John University, and sustainability and business from the University of Leeds. Our aim is to explore how SMEs involved in film, multimedia arts, advertising and immersive and interactive digital technologies can communicate the criticality of sustainability and sustainability transformations through creative storytelling for the purpose of educating and guiding policymakers, consumers and market actors.

Gemma Bridge

York St John

Biography
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I am based in Leeds, UK where I work as an academic. My research interests span public health and environmental, economic and social sustainability. I completed my PhD in public health communication and policy at Leeds Beckett University and have since worked with several research groups to explore, analyse and better understand challenges and opportunities relating to the health and wellbeing of people and places. I am currently working with academics from York St John and Leeds University, as well as industry partners, to explore how communicators working in the creative sector can critically engage with and communicate about sustainability in order to stimulate the progressive and transformative change that is needed across society.