The discursive framing of the climate and health polycrisis in English, French and Spanish

Curry, Niall ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4471-6794 and Brookes, Gavin (2025) The discursive framing of the climate and health polycrisis in English, French and Spanish. In: Critical Approaches to Polycrisis: Discourses of Conflict, Migration, Risk and Climate. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783031769658 (In Press)

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Abstract

The climate and health polycrisis represents a complex network of cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and interdiscursive interdependencies threatening the future of life on Earth. This chapter investigates the complexities underpinning this polycrisis through an analysis of its discursive framing. Through a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the use of health, santé and salud in climate-themed and health-themed parascientific communication in English, French, and Spanish, three recurrent framing activities are identified. These include defining and contextualising the polycrisis, representing cause and effect, and proposing solutions. These framing activities were interrogated to determine variation in the cultural and epistemological construction of knowledge of the climate and health polycrisis. The findings highlight the crucial role of cultural and linguistic diversity in shaping responses to global crises and call for pluriversal approaches to knowledge production to address the complex challenges posed by global polycrises.