Science vs Story: Strategies for Climate Change Communication
Increasing populations around the world are concerned about climate change, but a vocal minority of skeptics has an outweighed influence on political decision-making. In this talk, Emma Frances Bloomfield examines storytelling as a vehicle for engaging more people in scientific topics such as climate change. When faced with competing stories from religion, politics, and economics, science does itself a disservice by not harnessing the power of story. This talk explores climate change’s storytelling potential and introduces narrative webs and narrative constellations as strategies to strengthen science communication

Emma Frances Bloomfield Biography
Emma Frances Bloomfield (PhD, University of Southern California) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a rhetorician who studies environmental communication and scientific controversies. Her first book, Communication Strategies for Climate Skepticism: Religion and the Environment (2019) was published in Routledge’s Advances in Climate Change Research series. She has published in journals such as Environmental Communication, Science Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Climatic Change.