Congratulations go out to Graham Smart as a recipient of a Faculty of Arts and Social Science Research Award for Junior Faculty (2011).
Read the abstract for his research project below.
Overcoming Discursive Barriers to Public Understanding in the Debate over Climate Change: The Rhetorical Uses of Science
– Graham Smart
A major hindrance to public engagement and constructive dialogue in the ongoing debate over global climate change is the discursive complexity of the arguments in play. Climate-change argumentation, with its combining of multiple discourses—including those of science, technology, economics, social justice, and governance—can be difficult to understand and evaluate for educators, activists, and other citizens alike. A key aspect of this discursive complexity stems from the rhetorical use of science—or more specifically, the rhetorical use of discursively constructed representations of science. Science, as employed for persuasive purposes in the climate-change debate, is represented in multiple ways across different instances of argumentation. My research will explore the rhetorical uses of representations of science with a view to fostering a ‘literacy of argumentation’—the ability to comprehend and evaluate complex specialized arguments—for observers of the public debate over global climate change.