Images that support and propagate specific narratives about politics, identity or climate (Doerr and Langa 2024, Rossi et al. 2025, Waldherr at al. 2025). Building on an extensive dataset of European social media visual content, PolarNar will investigate how activists and political actors visually represent issues connected with the climate debate and what role these visual narratives play in the existing polarization around the topic.
We will consolidate this research into an academic article focusing on the writing of a scientific paper on the polarizing power of specific visual narratives in the context of climate change. We will leverage the vast amount of visual digital data that has been collected to create a research data repository for the larger research community, and we will develop the knowledge and expertise accumulated by the participants into a new proposal for a large-scale research project studying the dynamics of persuasive visual storytelling.
- Doerr, N. and M. F Langa (2024) “’Images of Nature in Online Climate Activism in Germany and Argentina: Science, Affect and Non-Human ‘Everybodies’’, Journal for Development Studies, 39, 3-4, 33-64. Open access.
- Rossi, L., Segerberg, A., Arminio, L., & Magnani, M. (2025). Do You See What I See? Emotional Reaction to Visual Content in the Online Debate About Climate Change. Environmental communication, 19(3), 449-467.
- Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Gallagher, R. J., Klinger, K., Stoltenberg, D., Kumar, S., Ridley, D., & Foucault Welles, B. (in press). Waves of attention to racial injustice on social media: Extrajudicial police killings in the United States as focusing events. Social Science Computer Review.
Main research areas
- Polarization
- Visual narrative
- Social media
- Climate change