Feeling the changing climate: An affective approach to the strategic communication of floods in a tourist city

Previous research has studied the strategic communication of climate change as a rational and purposeful means of communicating about climate change in accordance with political, corporate or scientific interests. These studies often consider emotions either as the psychological effects of planned communication, or as pre-existing attachments that influence an individual's understanding of the issue. Accordingly, strategic communication of climate change is designed either to elicit a certain emotional response from selected publics, or to find the right communicative formula to overcome people's psycho-emotional barriers.
This thesis introduces a different view of emotions as affect in strategic communication research, and proposes that collectively shared feelings can also be mobilized by strategic communication to influence how climate change is understood and addressed. To this end, the thesis examines the strategic communication of floods in the tourist city of Venice. Through atmospheric ethnography and narrative analysis, it shows how the strategic communication of the local municipality and a group of local scientists influences the constitution of climate change in the city by either preserving or resisting the existence of three affective atmospheres and the collective ways of feeling floods within them. Thus, strategic communication is shown to preserve or resist the existence of those affective atmospheres where floods are felt as wonderful and authentic Venetian experiences, as exceptional events resisted by technology, and as dangerous phenomena, in this way contributing to the constitution of climate change as a non-existent, solved, and unavoidable problem, respectively.
The findings of this thesis demonstrate strategic communication as a cultural practice that participates in the creation of public culture, and in the discussion of public issues such as climate change. Furthermore, the findings extend studies of climate denial and delay by suggesting that these phenomena depend not only on the purposeful forms of communication of an abstract and influential group of politicians and corporations, but especially on how well strategic communication mobilises collective emotional orientations towards the tangible manifestations of climate change around us. Consequently, resisting attempts to deny or delay climate action in climate-vulnerable urban destinations requires a broader and more overt effort to change the collective modes of feeling the changing climate in these places.