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Much of the environmental communication literature follows the consensus-building perspective and thus explores how to communicate climate change in ways that can diffuse politico-ideological conflict. My paper, on the other hand, builds on the critical debate approach—which asserts that the depoliticization of climate change acts as a barrier to transformative socio-ecological change—and argues that animated parody offers a powerful rhetorical tool to re-politicize climate change. I develop the paper's argument through a case study of the Rick and Morty episode "A Rickconvenient Truth"—a parodical take on the 1990s children's TV show Captain Planet and the Planeteers. By applying reflexive thematic analysis to a dataset of >7,600 Reddit user comments, I reveal that the episode prompts fans to question "standard" ways of thinking about climate change and deliberate radical alternatives for combatting the ecological crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates historical photographs exhibited at public heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis reveals that – by portraying 19th-century environmental change as a 'heroic' narrative of 'progress' – the photographs construct New Zealand national identity in opposition to nature, rather than promote a sense of connectedness with the natural environment. The article thus makes three important contributions to the literature on the visualization of environmental and climate change. First, the empirical case study demonstrates that visual narratives shape our social identities in relation to nature. Second, the article adds a rare socio-semiotic analysis to the environmental communication literature, highlighting that photographs have to be examined through multimodal methods and in relation to wider discursive processes of meaning making. Third, by borrowing ideas from the literature on collective memory, the article shows that, even though they depict scenes that are set in the distant past, historical photographs can still influence environmental attitudes and behaviours in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biographical narratives generate a continuous sense of political community across the state's past, present and future, and provide the state with ontological security. Building on growing International Relations scholarship that highlights the power of visuals in shaping global politics, our article proposes visual rhetorical analysis as a tool to interrogate how governments employ images to tell their biographical narratives. The rhetorical approach transcends the methodological divide in the current 'visual turn' literature between the cognitive psychological and poststructuralist perspectives. We illustrate the analytical value of the rhetorical approach through an empirical study of how the totalitarian regimes of China and North Korea communicate their biographical narratives – the 'rightful great power' narrative and the 'family state' narrative, respectively – through propaganda imagery of their leaders. To this end, we develop a close semiotic reading of selected photographs of Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un in different narrative settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research shows that the pariah regime of North Korea—as other countries too—cares about how it is perceived internationally. However, so far, we know very little about how effective North Korea's strategic efforts are in improving its image among foreign audiences. As a first step toward addressing this gap, we employ a rigorous survey experiment among a representative sample of US adults (N = 800) to demonstrate that propaganda photographs of Kim Jong-un—produced and distributed by the regime's official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)—succeed in improving perceptions of North Korea, albeit only among audiences with limited political knowledge. By providing evidence that news photographs are effective strategic communication instruments, our paper also makes an original and significant contribution to general scholarship on mediated public diplomacy, which has until now paid little attention to visual media as a tool of image management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of memory studies has, in recent years, experienced a 'nonhuman turn' that extends the analytical focus beyond anthropocentric functions of collective remembering. However, while this growing literature has considerably enhanced our understanding of how memories of environmental change may promote a stronger sense of connectedness with nature, the different arguments – developed mainly through critical readings of cultural texts – have yet to be investigated empirically. By means of an original survey of 1,100+ adults in Aotearoa New Zealand, the paper here provides a first step towards addressing the empirical gap in the 'nonhuman turn' literature. Two main findings emerge from this analysis. First, knowing about historical environmental change and overestimating the extent of environmental change make it more likely that individuals see themselves as part of nature. Second, the survey demonstrates that the relationship between memories of environmental change and closeness to nature interacts with wider political conflicts over how to remember the colonial past. In particular, the question of who to blame for historical environmental change shapes the effect of ecological memories in different ways, depending on whether respondents identify as European New Zealanders or Indigenous Māori. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a long-running conflict between a Euro-centric 'master narrative' of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the 'top-down' perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the 'bottom-up' approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the 'critical years' of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand's nation brand has drawn ever louder accusations of "greenwashing" the country's image in recent years. Through a visual discourse analysis of Air New Zealand's Tiaki & The Guardians safety briefing video, this article shows that brand managers have responded with a strategy of "Indigenous-washing," appropriating the Māori worldview to deflect attention from intensive farming's carbon footprint and other environmentally unfriendly activities. More broadly, this article makes an important contribution to the growing critical-cultural literature on nation branding by revealing how New Zealand's latest marketing initiative contributes to the depoliticization of climate change. The "Tiaki" campaign not only positions New Zealand as an "untouched land," but also closes the space for democratic debate about climate change by obscuring the role of colonialism in causing the planet's ecological crisis and by silencing alternative socioecological futures proposed by Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a carefully crafted comparison of East Asia's surviving communist regimes (North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos), this article offers a rare systematic study of how dictatorships manipulate collective memory to their own advantage. I employ methods of narrative analysis to identify different storytelling strategies that may serve to anthropomorphize the regime party as the "hero" in relation to the historical past. Moreover, I rely on quantitative content analysis (N > 2000) to demonstrate that the four communist regimes use propaganda photographs of their respective leaders to communicate collective memory narratives to mass audiences. The article thus makes two original contributions to the literature on autocratic politics. First, I show that narratives provide autocratic regimes with a powerful tool to tap into different sources of legitimacy, including output and identity legitimacy. Second, the findings of the visual content analysis suggest that, contrary to existing views, personalization – at least in terms of media personalization – does not have to come at the expense of the regime party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]