Professor Julie Doyle researches in media and communication and is an authority on climate communication. Her research examines the ways in which media and culture shape our understandings of, and responses to, climate change.

With a particular focus upon visual communication, Prof. Doyle has worked collaboratively with visual artists and cultural educators, and provided consultancy for environmental NGOs, government and the sustainability communications sector on best practice for climate and environmental communication.

Professor Doyle is committed to examining the role of media and communication in understanding and addressing climate change, and in working collaboratively to find ways to create more sustainable societies. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, is Co-Chair of MeCCSA’s Climate Change Network and was a member of the founding Board of Directors of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA).

Watch Professor Doyle's inaugural lecture, 'Communicating Climate Change in an Age of (Un)Certainty' (May 2017).

See Professor Doyle's research impact through her contributions to a REF2021 impact case study on Mobilising Visual Communication for Socio-Political Change

Climate Change Communication: Media and (Visual) Culture

With a specific focus upon the visual, Professor Doyle's research explores how climate change is made culturally meaningful across a range of social and cultural practices, including arts, news media, science, NGO campaigning, business, and celebrity and popular culture.

Professor Doyle examines the limitations, and the possibilities, visual communication presents in communicating and engaging audiences with climate change. Her book Mediating Climate Change (Routledge 2011/16) explored how practices of (visual) mediation (within and across science, environmentalism and media) have come to shape how we understand and respond to climate change. Through contemporary case studies drawn from news media, arts and NGO campaigning, she argued for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations in order to make climate change meaningful to the cultural values and practices of people’s everyday lives.

Creative Climate Communication and (Youth) Engagement

Professor Doyle works on collaborative interdisciplinary research projects with artists and cultural educators to explore how creative methods can facilitate climate engagement and transformative learning. 

Professor Doyle has worked with ONCA Centre for Arts and Ecology on a collaborative arts project with young people, called FutureCoast Youth, that brought future climate into the present through creative storytelling and play. She has more recently worked on two participatory youth projects: cli-MATES, which explores the role of social norms and group efficacy in engaging young adults with climate change; and the System Change Hive, an Arts Council funded project which uses arts and communication to explore alternative zero-carbon futures and visions of society though systems change.

Through a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence award, Professor Doyle previously collaborated with the artist David Harradine (from Fevered Sleep performance company) to explore how a creative dialogue between art and media studies can lead to new visualisations of climate change. Titled Here Today: Moving Images of Climate Change, the collaborative project led to the creation of a multi-format film called, It’s the Skin You’re Living in, which explores and challenges images of climate change by connecting climate to humans and ‘home’.

Science, Technology and the Body

Professor Doyle has previously researched the interrelationships between surgery, medicine and the body.  She completed her doctorate in 2001 at the University of Sussex, where she examined the cultural histories of surgery and anatomy in the formation of gendered embodiment. She has examined the visual culture of medicine and science and its relation to the gendered/sexed body, with a focus upon surgical technologies and practices - both historical and contemporary - in the shaping of body knowledge. She has also examined how discourses of class are used to promote cosmetic surgery on reality TV.

Professor Doyle has supervised doctoral work on creative and visual climate change communication and engagement, media discourses of environment, gender and popular culture, branding and consumption. She would be happy to supervise work on any aspect of:

* climate and environmental communication

* media, popular culture and environment

* creative approaches to climate engagement and systems change

* climate activism and social movements

* visual climate and environmental communication

* veganism, popular culture/media and ethics

* feminist ecological ethics