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Funding Calls, Conferences and other Activities

Communicating Sustainabilities relies on cooperation, discussion and sharing of ideas. You can find more about forthcoming seminars, conferences and activities below.

Recontextualizing Climate Change: Commodification and Depoliticization in Everyday Semiotics. Call for papers ending on: 31/08/2026

Call for papers ending on: 31/08/2026

Social Semiotics Special Issue

Recontextualizing Climate Change: Commodification and Depoliticization in
Everyday Semiotics

Guest Editors:

Changpeng Huan and Monica Colombo

Special Issue Information

Climate change has become one of the defining concerns of contemporary public
life and a pervasive communicative phenomenon. References to saving the
planet now saturate everyday commercial, instutional, educational and
cultural spaces, appearing on coffee cups, fast-fashion labels, boarding
passes, investment fund brochures, tourism campaigns, and children’s
picture books. The language and imagery of environmental responsibility have
become a routine feature of everyday life. Yet this communicative ubiquity
coexists with a widely documented gap between discourse and material reality:
carbon emissions continue to rise, biodiversity loss accelerates, and
international climate targets remain, by most credible assessments,
drastically undermet.

A substantial body of scholarship has productively examined the discursive
construction of climate change in media, politics, and science communication,
drawing on critical discourse analysis, framing theory, and multimodal
analysis. This growing body of work has generated important insights into how
climate change is represented, contested, and denied in institutional
settings. Yet, what it has been less attentive to is the more diffuse process
by which climate change is entering and reorganising the ordinary texture of
everyday life, reshaping how products are branded, how places are designed
and signposted, how stories are told to children, how food is marketed, how
travel is sold, how futures are imagined. As climate issues are
recontextualised into commercial and institutional domains, they are
frequently depoliticised, stripped of their radical urgency and repackaged to
align with the logics of consumerism and corporate branding.

The green palette dominating corporate visual identities, the carbon labels
on food packaging, and the deployment of AI tools to generate
marketing-aligned ecological futures are not merely representations of
climate change; they are profound instances of semiotic recontextualization.
They signify shifts in the availability, configuration, and social valuation
of meaning-making resources. Climate change is thus not only a topic of
public debate but a force remaking the communicative fabric of the everyday,
often serving commercial interests as much as, or more than, ecological ones.

This special issue invites critical, empirically grounded studies that
examine this remaking. Our primary interest lies in how climate concern is
taken up, reshaped, commodified, and depoliticised as it enters the
communicative routines of daily life. We welcome contributions from across
discourse studies, social semiotics, multimodal analysis, media and
communication research, critical marketing studies, visual culture, and
related fields. What unites the special issue is not a single methodology but
a shared commitment to critical, evidence-based analysis of how the language
and imagery of environmental responsibility are detached from their material
conditions and domesticated within everyday semiotic practices.

Topics
We invite submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following
areas of inquiry.

The commodification of saving the planet. References to environmental
responsibility are now an integral part of everyday commercial life, yet the
underlying material issues they attempt to resolve have remainly largely
unchanged. How has the notion of ‘saving the planet’ been incorporated
into the realm of branding, marketing and consumer culture? How do
corporations, retailers, service providers package green concerns as a
selling point, through green product design, sustainability pledges,
carbon-neutral labelling, and eco-tourism marketing? We invite research that
takes ‘green washing’ beyond just being false representations but as a
logic of communication with its own design principles and conditions of
credibility, and that asks: what happens to environmental politics when its
language and imagery become raw material for commodity culture?

The political economy of AI in climate discourse. Rather than analyzing AI
generated outputs in a vacuum, we invite research that understands how AI
tools are implemented and utilized in climate communications. How do the base
search parameters, data sets used to train these tools, and dependency upon
low cost, open access image libraries that typically reflect the aesthetic of
commercial advertising influence the creation of symbolic representations of
climate change? How does the institutional use of AI recontextualize or
de-politicize the climate crisis? How AI-driven semiotic production serves
specific commercial interests and reshapes public encounters with climate
information?

Corporate semiotics and consumer culture. How do corporations construct and
recontextualise climate concern using branding, visual identity, ESG
reporting, and public relations? What tensions, contradictions, or strategic
ambiguities can be revealed by critical analysis of the way verbal, visual,
and material dimensions of ‘net zero’ commitments and sustainability
campaigns work together? At the micro-level, how is environmental
responsibility embedded in product packaging, green labelling, and retail
environments through colour, typography, material texture, and certification
logos? What does the proliferation of ‘eco, organic, and sustainable’
labeling on everyday commodities (food, clothing, cosmetics etc.) indicate
about the normalisation of climate language in everyday commerce?

Children’s media and ecological socialisation. How do educational
materials, picture books, toys, and games frame the climate crisis for young
audiences as individual responsibility, collective action, consumer choice,
or adventure narrative? What ideological assumptions about agency (e.g.,
individual consumer choice vs. collective action) underline these
representations, and shape the environmental common sense of future
generations?

Screen media and the entertainment industry. How do fictional and documentary
screen media navigate the tension between communicating climate messages and
the commercial imperatives of their parent companies? How does climate change
function as an aesthetic resource or branding attribute in contemporary
screen-based media culture? What does this say about the cultural
normalisation of ecological disaster?

Climate affect and grassroots resistance. How are climate anxiety, ecological
grief articulated in everyday semiotic practices? What semiotic resources do
individuals draw on to express climate distress on social media, in protest
actions, or through art, and how do these grassroots semiotic practices
resist or interact with dominant commodified narratives?

The spatial politics of climate design. How is climate risk and
responsibility made visible or invisible in urban and rural spaces? How do
flood warning signs, carbon neutral infrastructure, and environmental signage
reshape the communicative ecology of place? Whose interests do these
interventions serve, and what do they reveal about the unequal distribution
of climate risks and responsibilities?

Global circulation and translation of climate meaning. How do climate
meanings travel across languages, media systems, and geopolitical contexts?
How are the communicative practices of Global South communities translated,
commodified, or marginalised when entering internationally circulating
climate discourse? What can critical analysis reveal about the politics of
inclusion and exclusion in the global governance of climate meaning?

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should be between 7,000 and 9,000 words (including references)
and should follow the Social Semiotics style guidelines. All submissions will
undergo double-blind peer review.

Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of a maximum of
500 words, together with a short biographical note, to guest editors by 31
August 2026. Abstracts should clearly indicate the empirical material to be
analysed, the analytical approach to be employed, and the contribution the
paper aims to make to the special issue’s themes.

Key Dates

Abstract submission deadline: 31 August 2026

Notification of abstract decisions: 30 September 2026

Full paper submission deadline: 28 February 2027

Peer review and revision: March-April 2027

Anticipated publication: August 2027

For informal enquiries about the scope and suitability of proposed contributions, please contact the guest editors at changpenghuan@um.edu.mo and monica.colombo@unimib.it

Exploring Language Education Conference: Sustainable Language Education. Aarhus 8th-10th June 2027. Abstract deadline 1/12/26

This conference is the fourth in the Exploring Language Education (ELE) conference series, with previous editions in Stockholm, Oslo and Vasa. The ELE conferences are held every three years in changing locations. The ELE conferences employ a broad definition of language education, aiming to bring together scholars working in different areas of the field. The conferences are intended to reflect a variety of perspectives on language education (in terms of first and additional languages) with learners of all ages.

The theme of the 4th ELE conference is Sustainable Language Education, and we particularly welcome papers, posters and proposals for symposia related to this theme from scholars from around the world.

See the conference website here.

Goa Sustainability Summit 2026- Blue and Green Horizons: Bridging Ecology,Economy, and Community. November 2026.

Call for Papers: Goa Sustainability Summit 2026- Blue and Green Horizons: Bridging Ecology,Economy, and Community

We are happy to announce the Goa Sustainability Summit 2026, to be held in Goa, India, on 26th to 27th November 2026. The theme is: Blue and Green Horizons: Bridging Ecology, Economy, and Community.

The Goa Sustainability Summit 2026 is conceived not just as a conference, but as a collaborative action platform. By leveraging Goa's unique position as a biodiversity hotspot and a hub for international tourism and business, the summit aims to set a regenerative roadmap for coastal and tropical economies worldwide. We are now inviting colleagues to submit abstracts to the event, some of the themes are:

1. Beyond the Beach - Regenerative Tourism & Hospitality: Decarbonising hotel operations, eliminating single-use plastics, and designing tourism models that restore local ecosystems rather than deplete them.

2. Securing the Coast - Climate Adaptation & Infrastructure: Mangrove conservation, climate-resilient construction along coastlines, and early warning systems for extreme weather.

3. Circular Economy in Action - Waste to Wealth: Innovative solutions in solid waste management, wastewater treatment and reuse (water neutrality), and upcycling agricultural/hotel waste.

4. Green Finance and ESG Investment Landscape: How businesses can access green bonds, carbon credits, and impact capital. Case studies of successful sustainability-linked investments in India.

5. Empowering Communities - The Just Transition: Skilling local youth for green jobs (solar installation, organic farming, eco-guiding), protecting the rights of traditional fishing communities, and ensuring energy democracy.

6. Sustainability in Higher Education and Study Programmes, including transdisciplinary approaches

The papers will be published in the book "Blue and Green Horizons: Bridging Ecology, Economy, and Community", to be published as part of the "World Sustainability Series" published by Springer Nature. This is the world´s leading peer-reviewed book series on matters related to sustainable development, with over 100 books published to date. The series is Scopus indexed and has over the years officially counted for Promotion and tenure purposes, as well as part of PhD programmes.

The event, at a top location with beautiful nature, offers specialists a great opportunity to present their work to a global audience, and for Indian experts to interact with colleagues from other countries and research contexts. The details can be seen at: https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.haw-hamburg.de%2Fen%2Funiversity%2Fnewsroom%2Fnews-details%2Fnews%2Fnews%2Fshow%2Fgoa-sustainability-summit-2026%2F&data=05%7C02%7CTom.Bartlett%40glasgow.ac.uk%7Cf34a821397b0496d612308de82c5e335%7C6e725c29763a4f5081f22e254f0133c8%7C1%7C0%7C639091983728644465%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Yh4ewN%2FaKVnfHtJeZtM7ZIOu3BrAIzFS4VeZgxGldtc%3D&reserved=0.

Discovery Sustainability: Invitation to submit papers to collections

European School of Sustainability Science and Research - network of universities

European School of Sustainability Science and Research: 100 members mark reached

Founded in October 2018, the European School of Sustainability Science and Research (ESSSR) (www.esssr.eu) has now grown to more than 100 members. It is thus Europe's largest network of universities specifically focusing on research on matters related to sustainable development. Apart from coordinating various research projects in cooperation with its partners, ESSSR is frequently leading a variety of high complex research applications. In addition, ESSSR members are currently undertaking a number of studies, whose results are regularly published in peer-reviewed journals. With its events, ESSSR reaches out also to stakeholders beyond academia, for example, via its Hamburg Sustainability Session Series (https://esssr.eu/hamburg-sustainability-sessions/), focusing on sustainability topics of relevance to businesses.

The Chairman of ESSSR, Professor Walter Leal (https://walterleal.info/), who also is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education (https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1467-6370), and the World Sustainability Series with Springer (https://www.springer.com/series/13384), sees ESSSR as a central player in the international sustainable development research scene.

European higher education institutions interested to join ESSSR – and/or contribute to its various activities – can access the forms https://forms.office.com/e/F0g0vmNcvM or contact its team at: esssr@haw-hamburg.de.

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