Thorsten Philipp, Senior Researcher, TU Berlin

Learning from Latency: Pop Music as a Sounding Board of Environmental Communication

keywords: Sustainability Communication, Political Communication, Environmental Communication

With its ubiquitous and pervasive character, pop music affects our everyday lives in many ways. In which way does it shape our communication on environmental conflicts? Has pop music any transformative potential to make us learn how to narrate environmental changes and crises perceptions?

This contribution approaches selected environment related pop music samples by critically examining their ability to process latent structures of a society. According to German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann (2005), the problem of latency refers to the challenge of observing what is hidden behind multiple layers of silence: unnegotiated conflicts that are communicatively not dealt with, subconscious streams of a society. Art and sciences, however, may provide perspectives and methods that allow latency to be recognized. Departing from this assumption, this talk explores pop music as a means of environmental politainment (Riegert & Collins 2016) and as a soundscape of latency: by examining pop music contributions from thematic complexes such as catastrophe narrations, ecological guilt, wilderness, and ecofeminism. The overview shows that pop music can be experienced as a sounding board for environmental conflict negotiation, as a forum for eco-activism and as a means of education for sustainable development.

References

• Luhmann, N. Social Systems. Stanford 2005.
• Riegert, K. and S. Collins. “Politainment”, in The international encyclopedia of political communication, ed. Gianpietro Mazzoleni et al., 974–84. Chichester 2016

About

Christian Kielmann

A scientist with a non-disciplinary agenda, Thorsten's mission is to promote academic education and collaborative knowledge production as an interplay between university, economy, culture, politics, and civil society. At Technische Universität Berlin, he supports the presidium by designing transdisciplinary learning facilities and creating experimental didactic immersion fields for students. Associate lecturer at the universities of Passau and Lüneburg, Thorsten deals in his seminars with political communication, sustainability theories, urban studies, and philosophy of science. In his research, he explores pop music as a sounding board for sustainability communication. Recent publication: Handbook Transdisciplinary Learning (2023, Bielefeld: transcript, co-edited)