Anders Horsbøl

Climate Change Discourses and Citizen Participation: A Case Study of the Discursive Construction of Citizenship in Two Public Events

Citizen participation is a recurrent and democratically important issue in the ongoing debate about climate change. However, different meanings are ascribed to citizen participation in different contexts, ranging from top-down involvement to bottom-up engagement, thus creating tension between conflicting ideals. Focusing on public engagement and its construal in different situational contexts, we explore how citizens are discursively included or excluded from participation, as various climate change discourses unfold in two forums where local needs and global concerns interact. Furthermore, we address some opportunities and barriers regarding citizen participation in climate change issues.

Energy Transition in and by the Local Media The Public Emergence of an 'Energy Town'

Abstract Climate change mitigation and the transition to environmentally sustainable forms of life have become central public issues, and a number of studies have investigated the role of the media in constructing and distributing representations of climate change and sustainability. Most of these studies have addressed the media at a national or international level. This article investigates the mediating of a local, municipal initiative, i.e. the so-called ‘Energy Town Frederikshavn’ project in northern Denmark, which has set the ambitious goal of complete transition to renewable energy consumption and CO2 neutrality within a few years. Using frame analysis, informed by discourse studies, the article analyzes how the project emerged and was established as a public phenomenon in the media coverage, including how it was made intelligible and which social actors were represented as having a say on the matter. The findings show several differences to national or international representations of climate change and sustainability, such as a prevalent profiling frame and an indication of a reversal of the so-called Giddens’ paradox.

Timing GMO: discursive constructions of temporality in local discussions of a global issue

In this article, we study the relationship of temporality and ideology through examples from a local controversy over field testing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in casu maize, in a rural area in the north of Denmark. Our primary focus is on ways in which participants represent time on shorter or longer timescales, and how these timescales are linked discursively. Our data stem from three sources: a video-recording of an anti-GMO demonstration in a minor town in Denmark, a recording of a public meeting of farmers who consider possible advantages of growing GM crops, and a focus-group interview with citizens. We argue that temporality contributes significantly to the discursive construction of genetically modified crops, and we suggest that a temporal perspective should be added to the repertoire of critical discourse analysis.

Co-Creating Green Transition: How Municipality Employees Negotiate their Professional Identities as Agents of Citizen Involvement in a Cross-Local Setting

ABSTRACT Citizen involvement plays an important role in many governmental and municipal attempts towards green transition, reflecting a departure from a deficit model of public communication towards participatory ambitions of engaging citizens. Recently, the notion of co-creation or co-production has gained importance as a way of conceptualizing and organizing citizen involvement. The current study examines how four municipality partners in Sweden and Denmark embark on a common project on citizen involvement and co-creation as an avenue to green transition, addressing private decisions of individual citizens or families where the municipality has no legislative competence. By analysing how several local authorities with different but similar challenges negotiate and jointly identify themselves as agents of citizen involvement, the study offers an upscaling to what may be termed the plura-local level. Analytically, the study takes a discourse approach, combining close readings of texts and talk with an interdiscursive and diachronic analysis.

Public conceptions of publicness in the wake of the Copenhagen killings

The deadly attacks on a public meeting and on a Jewish citizen in Copenhagen in February 2015 have given rise to a vast amount of public discussion and interpretation of the events themselves, their background, their causes, their significance, and their repercussions. During these discussions, various conceptions of publicness and public space have been articulated. Indeed, one may view the killings as a ‘critical discourse moment’ in which a range of discourses have been employed to help interpret, understand, and deal with what happened. In several of these discourses, conceptions of publicness play a central part. This article sets out to investigate the conceptions of publicness that were articulated in the Danish public spheres following the attacks. The article maps out some of the key different and partly contradictory notions of publicness that the reactions to the killings brought to the fore. The investigation thus focuses on the articulation of normative expectations and ideals of public spheres, on the limitations and restrictions that were acknowledged, and on the main societal problems and (inter)national contexts to which publicness was viewed as related. The analysis will cover national newspapers and center on the discursive resources of the media elite in early responses to the attacks, for example in editorials, or comments by writers, academics, debaters, and intellectuals.

Placing discourse analysis: Meta-discursive strategies in a cross-cultural setting

‘‘Discourse analysis has come to mean many different things in as many different places’’, Hajer noticed back in 1995 (Hajer 1995: 43). In this issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses, the Lead Article by Dominique Maingueneau and Johannes Angermüller offers valuable and inspiring insights into what discourse analysis has come to mean in two different ‘‘places’’, France and Germany. As Maingueneau states, ‘‘Discourse Analysis has been subject to a process of globalization’’ where ‘‘more and more researchers throughout the world are exchanging ideas about approaches to discourse’’ (Maingueneau 2011). This exchange implies processes of interpretation, application and modification of concepts, models and analytical practices, and the articles of Angermüller and Maingueneau can be seen as contributions to help understand and qualify these processes. The articles open the eyes of the reader to forms of discourse analysis as they play out in different cultural spaces, embedded in or dialogically related to different intellectual traditions outside what may be seen as the Anglo-American ‘‘mainstream’’. They remind us that there is no such thing as the discourse analysis; that discourse analysis is to be understood in the plural. They remind us of the historical and the cultural conditioning of discourse analysis (and of academic traditions in general) and as such they may help us not only to analyze discourses and discursive practices as historically contingent, but also to reflect on the conditions of possibility of our own concepts and methods (Shi-xu 2005, 2009). It may be mentioned here that the three special issues in Journal of Multicultural Discourses on Asian, African and Latin American approaches to discourse/communication, respectively (2009: 1; 2010: 2; 2010: 3), provide new evidence of the cultural nature of discourse scholarship. At the same time, however, the very endeavor of Angermüller and Maingueneau inevitably runs the risk of stereotyping the national tradition and reifying the French or the German discourse analysis. However, the authors deal with this risk openly and deliberately and, in fact, do not present a monolithic German or French discourse analysis, but rather a plurality of approaches, which make up the specificities of German or French discourse analysis.