Living with climate change : A critical examination of global news agencies and their representations of women in the context of climate change

Sammanfattning: This study strives to provide an insight as to how gender is dealt with by global news agencies within the context of climate change. The capacity to adapt to change is shaped by power relations related to social identities of people and group. Gender is a key element of these identities. Global news agencies are to a large extent responsible for what we see and understand of that world. However, in the media research field, few media studies has examined how global news agencies discusses gender in the context of climate change. Through a critical discourse analysis combined with a postcolonial feminist perspective, this study has closely examined articles about climate change from the world’s three largest news agencies - Reuters, Associate Press and Agence France-Presse. Through the analysis four main categories have emerged: Poor women in need of help; Women getting help; Women within familial systems; and Women as experts. The result showed that the concepts of women was narrow and existed within imperialistic, mainstream discourses on women. Through these discursive constructions of women, news agencies risk reinforce a North-South bias and stereotypes of the ‘third world woman’.