Personal profile

Research interests

Professor Julie Doyle researches in media and communication and is an authority on climate communication. Her research examines the ways in which media and culture shape our understandings of, and responses to, climate change.

With a particular focus upon visual and creative communication, Prof. Doyle works collaboratively with visual artists and cultural educators, and has provided consultancy for environmental NGOs, government and the sustainability communications sector on best practice for climate and environmental communication. Her research on media and climate change has been cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Scientfiic Assessment Reports (IPCC 2018, 2022).

Professor Doyle is committed to examining the role of media and communication in understanding and addressing climate change, and in working collaboratively to find ways to create more sustainable societies. She was Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics and was a member of the founding Board of Directors of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA).

Watch Professor Doyle's inaugural lecture, 'Communicating Climate Change in an Age of (Un)Certainty' (May 2017).

See Professor Doyle's research impact through her contributions to a REF2021 impact case study on Mobilising Visual Communication for Socio-Political Change

Research interests

Climate Change Communication: Media and (Visual) Culture

With a specific focus upon the visual, Professor Doyle's research explores how climate change is made culturally meaningful across a range of social and cultural practices, including arts, news media, science, NGO campaigning, business, and celebrity and popular culture.

Professor Doyle examines the limitations, and the possibilities, visual communication presents in communicating and engaging audiences with climate change. Her book Mediating Climate Change (Routledge 2011/16) explored how practices of (visual) mediation (within and across science, environmentalism and media) have come to shape how we understand and respond to climate change. Through contemporary case studies drawn from news media, arts and NGO campaigning, she argued for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations in order to make climate change meaningful to the cultural values and practices of people’s everyday lives.

Creative Climate Communication and (Youth) Engagement

Professor Doyle works on collaborative interdisciplinary research projects with artists and cultural educators to explore how creative methods can facilitate climate engagement and transformative learning. 

Professor Doyle has worked with ONCA Centre for Arts and Ecology on a collaborative arts project with young people, called FutureCoast Youth, that brought future climate into the present through creative storytelling and play. She has more recently worked on two participatory youth projects: cli-MATES, which explores the role of social norms and group efficacy in engaging young adults with climate change; and the System Change Hive, an Arts Council funded project which uses arts and communication to explore alternative zero-carbon futures and visions of society though systems change.

Through a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence award, Professor Doyle previously collaborated with the artist David Harradine (from Fevered Sleep performance company) to explore how a creative dialogue between art and media studies can lead to new visualisations of climate change. Titled Here Today: Moving Images of Climate Change, the collaborative project led to the creation of a multi-format film called, It’s the Skin You’re Living in, which explores and challenges images of climate change by connecting climate to humans and ‘home’. Film can be viewed here.

Science, Technology and the Body

Professor Doyle has previously researched the interrelationships between surgery, medicine and the body.  She completed her doctorate in 2001 at the University of Sussex, where she examined the cultural histories of surgery and anatomy in the formation of gendered embodiment. She has examined the visual culture of medicine and science and its relation to the gendered/sexed body, with a focus upon surgical technologies and practices - both historical and contemporary - in the shaping of body knowledge. She has also examined how discourses of class are used to promote cosmetic surgery on reality TV.

 

Supervisory Interests

Professor Doyle has supervised doctoral work on creative and visual climate change communication and engagement, media discourses of environment, gender and popular culture, branding and consumption. She would be happy to supervise work on any aspect of:

* climate and environmental communication 

* creative climate communication and engagement

* media, popular culture and environment

* climate activism and social movements

* visual climate and environmental communication

* veganism, popular culture/media and ethics

* intersectional feminist ecological ethics

Education/Academic qualification

PhD, English Literature. Thesis title: ‘Imag(in)ing Anatomy: Dissecting Difference Through the Art of Surgery’, , University of Sussex

19972001

Award Date: 1 Jan 2002

Master, MA Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change, University of Sussex

19961997

Award Date: 30 Sept 1997

Bachelor, BA (Hons) English , University of Plymouth

19931996

Award Date: 30 Jun 1996

External positions

NERC Steering Committee Member

20212024

AHRC Peer Review Member, AHRC Peer Review College

20172024

ONCA, Board of Trustee member, ONCA

Sept 20152022

Co-Chair, Climate Change Network, MeCCSA, Climate Change Network, MeCCSA

20152023

Associate Editor, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Humanities Journal

2015 → …

Editorial Board, Environmental Communication, Environmental Communication Journal

2009 → …

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