Intersecting discourses of death and the climate crisis

Curry, Niall ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4471-6794 (2024) Intersecting discourses of death and the climate crisis. In: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Language and Death. Bloomsbury. (In Press)

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Abstract

This chapter centres on the discussion of the discourses of death constructed within climate crisis parascience. Opening with a discussion and contextualisation of literature on discourses of death and climate crisis, this chapter presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the lemma DEATH and its collocates in a corpus of academic blogs about the climate crisis. The study reveals a number of different ways in which death is socially constructed, signalling a propensity for abstracting and naturalising death in the climate crisis. The discussion of findings unpacks the potential impact of such a discursive construction of death on knowledge dissemination, points to possible future studies on death and climate discourse and offers a critical perspective on dominant and counter-perspectives that emerge from the data.