Joshua Garland’s research project, Framing Nature: Image Construction, Diffusion and Reception within the Environmental and Climate Movement involved a visual content analysis of environmental and climate movement imagery.
This project explored the possible avenues through which a visual re-imagining and framing of human-Nature relations may extend beyond a mutually destructive relationship to one where interwoven agencies are realised within the non-human. This represented a novel idea focused specifically on images within the cultural reproduction of Nature and society, and the implications of current visualisations and imaginations around this relationship. Do they, for instance, reproduce the long-standing Western/Eurocentric construction of Nature as ‘landscape’ which narrows the scope for valuing and interacting with the non-human beyond the appreciation of its visual beauty or exploitability as a resource; rendering it as a passive, neutral object? Or, are alternative interactions and identities explored within these visuals as part of a challenge towards existing value structures and understandings of Nature and society’s
relation to it?
Garland’s research contributes to knowledge and an interdisciplinary scholarship through producing new insights into ‘effective’ and important visual communications of Nature. This project developed an original critical theory exploring the possibilities and implications of imagery regarding cultural constructions and values around human-Nature relations in the context of climate and environmental crises. It did so through developing a visually-centred research design with three main complementary stages, namely a visual content analysis, a survey with embedded imagery to explore perspectives and feelings using an insightful semantic differential approach and semi-structured photo elicitation interviews with key informants.
This produced an image-centric, critical and comparative inquiry into how Nature is understood and what the possibilities are for communicating environmental and climate challenges to a wider public with the view to challenging culturally-informed constructions, values and interactions with Nature. This has implications if society is to move beyond its problematic relation to the non-human which is reflected in deforestation, consumption, pollution, wildfires, droughts, the loss of health, life and property and myriad other challenges. It is in this way and through its original methodological and theoretical approach that this research advocated for the importance of the visual in studies and practical responses to contemporary challenges facing human society today.