Tóth Benedek

 

Abstract1 As both a natural and social phenomenon, climate change is a defining issue and challenge for contemporary global scientific, economic, political and cultural life. In my study, I aim to present an approach that does not focus primarily on the concrete social impacts of climate change, but rather attempts to model how the phenomenon is thematized in social communication networks. My hypothesis is that the concept of climate change, as a discursive node thematising social knowledge. The paper presents the climate change concepts generated in social communication processes, reviews the structure and different layers of these concepts and the social discourses they define. The paper also addresses issues related to the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘anthropocene’ in order to show how climate change discourses are involved in rethinking the relationship between nature and society.