Letter to ESR members - November 2017

Dear members of the Environment, Science & Risk Communication Working Group (ESR WG),

At the Cartagena conference, in July 2017, a new section leadership was elected. Joana Diaz-Pont, Kerrie Foxwell-Norton and Maitreyee Mishra became the new vice-chairs, and I was honored to be re-elected as the chair of the group.

Joana is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Law of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Kerrie is an associate professor at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research of Griffith University in Australia, and also chair of the IAMCR Environmental Impact Committee, and Maitreyee is an assistant professor at Heidelberg University, Germany.

With this email, I – on behalf of the entire section – want to first of all thank the outgoing leadership – Anders Hansen and Dorothee Arlt – and acknowledge the wonderful work they have done in the past years (in the case of Anders, this includes the establishment of the group in 1988!). Dear Anders and Dorothee: thank you.

Secondly, I also want to announce our very first publication. You have received a call for papers for an edited volume with the tentative title “When the Local meets the Digital: Implications and Consequences for Environmental Communication”. This publication is a joint initiative together with the Science and Environment Communication Section of ECREA.

Thirdly, I also want to announce our very first section event to you. In the framework of this edited volume, a webinar will be organized on 15 March 2018 14-16h CET (UTC+1). While paper presentations will be reserved for authors of accepted abstracts, the webinar will be open to anyone who wishes to join the discussion. More info on that will follow. This webinar is also a joint initiative together with the Science and Environment Communication Section of ECREA.

Fourthly, since 7 November IAMCR’s Open Conference System (OCS) has been open to receiving your abstracts for the 2018 IAMCR Conference taking place in Eugene, Oregon (USA), which will be held under the general theme ‘Reimagining Sustainability: Communication and Media Research in a Changing World’. As this theme is directly relevant to our group, we expect you to submit abstracts in huge numbers. The individual call for papers of this group can be found on the conference website for quite some time now, however, we will be distributing it through the well-known channels from next week on.

Last, but not least, I would like to remind you how important it is that you renew your membership to the working group when renewing your general IAMCR membership. Please, don’t forget!

With kind regards,

Pieter Maeseele

IAMCR ESR WG Chair