On researching and teaching environmental advocacy
In the summer of 2024, I took a trip to NYC to research about environmental activism. My fellow whacking dancer from Pittsburgh, Lucy Chen had recommended me the Poster Museum. On visiting their website, I found that the Poster Museum had an exhibit of “We tried to Warn You: Environmental Crisis Posters, 1970–2020” curated by Tim Medland on display. I was not going to miss this.
As a scholar and teacher of environmental humanities with an interest in storytelling, I have been writing about narratives of crises that often eclipses serious environmental issues in the Global South. In a time where climate denialism is at its peak, we need to able to distinguish between the scale of climate change and environmental change to robustly organize against the problems. One of the reasons, why I visited the exhibit, was to study and identify ways in which the crises narrative has been solidified in the medium of the poster. However, that is not what this article is about.
A poster is a specific visual medium with an intention to capture attention and often accompanied by a call to action. As a result, corporations often use poster to put the onus of the responsibility of climate action on the individual. Posters are also a site of branding and used by companies to poke fun against a competitor. How does the site of a museum exhibit critically present these different aspects of environmental communication? I use two examples from the exhibit to show the importance of wall text and the responsibility that curation plays to offer critical commentary on the posters.
Considering that this poster has a history of portraying indigenous communities vulnerable because of climate change, to drive the corporation’s agenda of green washing, the wall text points this out cogently. Without this necessary context and complex history, it would be challenging for a visitor without access to the history of green-washing and visual politics to identify how posters are used by capitalism in pushing the version of crises that puts the responsibility on the individual.
Image : Pollution is a crying sham poster, Photograph by me
One of the posters that caught my attention was the one “We are sorry that we got caught” poster of 2015 by the group Brandalism that captured the emission scandal of Volkswagen where their “Green Car of the Year” emitted more nitrogen oxide than the permissible limits. This poster was widely popular during the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. The wall text accompanying the poster not only captures the scandal of Volkwagen but also reminds the visitors of the hypocrisy of companies and the ongoing litigation against it. As a researcher to the exhibit, I was also reflecting on the decision to capture humor as a form of advocacy against crises. If doomsday (signified by the presence of gas masks in multiple posters) was one model of representing the climate crisis, then humor represented the other pole of environmental communication.
In my classes on global environmental justice, postcolonial studies and feminist theory, teaching curation during their research projects is an important aspect of my pedagogical practice. Therefore, visiting the exhibiting and engaging with the choices made by the curators of the exhibit and the wall-text opened up for me ways in which I can approach teaching a genre (like the object label or the wall text) for environmental communication. For instance, I can imagine having conversations with students around how to ethically include artefacts, posters, texts with difficult implications and complex histories in their research and approaches to write about them, should they choose to do so.
As an educator, I feel that there is a constant need to keep working on our craft of research and teaching. And for me they are interconnected in an organic way, that the visit to the exhibit reminded me of.
How are research and teaching related for you?
