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Title EXPLORING CLIMATE CHANGE DISCOURSE IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE: A CORPUS ASSISTED ECOLINGUISTIC STUDY

Author(s) HAJRA MAZHAR RAJA

Abstract This research examines the Climate Change discourse from an ecolinguistics perspective to find the impact of National Geographic Magazine articles on perception building. With its long publication history dating back to 1888, National Geographic stands out as one of the most prestigious magazines and media communication platforms, making it a valid area of inquiry. Ecolinguistics has been evolving as a robust analytical discipline, shaping, directing, and criticizing environmental narratives and discourses since the 1970s. Arran Stibbe’s analytical approach to ecology has been instrumental in shaping the debates around the environment and Climate Change. This research draws on his 2015 seminal work Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, and is a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study contributes to existing knowledge on Climate Change by examining a corpus of 110 articles containing more than 295,559 words from National Geographic between 2016 and 2024, alongside the 7,400-word Paris Agreement corpus (2015). This corpus-assisted qualitative research is exploratory and descriptive. Three stories from Stibbe’s analytical framework have been selected to analyze metaphors, framing, and ideology. The research explores how National Geographic employs metaphors to manifest Climate Change and how descriptors related to conservation and sustainability frame perception in both the magazine and the Paris Agreement. The study also examines the role of National Geographic in manifesting beneficial, ambivalent, and destructive discourses. Findings show that “fear” and “urgency” dominate the metaphors in National Geographic, pointing to a discourse of policy intervention rooted in the Paris Agreement. The analysis uncovers discourse synergy between the magazine and the Agreement, showing that media discourse actively constructs public environmental perceptions.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2025-08-12

Subject English Linguistics

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