The evolution of the COPs' communication strategy on Instagram from 2015 to 2020 : a multimodal framing analysis

Details

Supervisors

Cougnon, Louise-Amélie ; Samofalova, Yuliya

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue, à finalité spécialisée: langues des affaires

Abstract

The Conferences of Parties are of great significance for civil society, as they create momentarily but periodically, a global discussion on climate change, both inside and outside the meeting rooms. In this discussion, the UNFCCC and the host country are the central actors. That is why this master thesis directly investigates their discourses on Instagram, a social media still largely understudied in the climate change communication discipline. It focuses more precisely on the evolution of frames and themes tackled in the accounts, the relationship between text and image, and the emotions the communicators mobilized. We assumed that the evolution of the communication in the COPs’ account was dependent on the themes tackled in each COP rather than on the overall evolution of climate change communication. After a multimodal framing analysis of 447 Instagram posts with the help of Pauwels and Mannay’s multimodal framing analysis toolkit (2020), we found that both the themes of the COPs and the climate change frames played a role in the accounts’ framing. The evolution of the frames was not linear but showed a great influence of calls to action, technological innovations, and climate policies. The COP23 account was affected by the localization of the Fijis in a so-called “sacrifice zone” and displayed more subjective and emotionally charged posts, a feature it shares with COP25.