Reporting civilizational collapse: Research notes from a world-in-crisis

Abstract

There is a woeful silence in global media as well as a widespread reluctance in the fields of media and communication studies to fully recognize and research the systemic and interlocking nature of deepening existential threats that together now constitute today’s ‘world-in-crisis’. It is time to move beyond disaggregated news reporting and research parochialisms and grapple conceptually and theoretically as well as empirically and politically with the complexity of the planetary emergency and its communication. This article elaborates on these claims and provides conceptual and theoretical coordinates of use in re-imagining mainstream journalism’s potential for processes of transition and transformation.