Activists, Politicians and Children: Visual Representations of Climate Change in Swedish Newspapers 2019

Sammanfattning: Visual representations can either concretise climate change or make it more abstract and remote. This thesis aims to bring light to how Swedish news imagery of 2019 promotes particular views on climate change. Specifically, it examines the prevalence of five visual themes (people, impacts, causes, landscape and nature, and solutions) and investigates how different geographic regions are depicted in relation to these themes. To explore what kind of imagery is used to visualise climate change in Swedish press, 601 images from six newspapers are examined using quantitative content analysis. A qualitative reading of five individual images supplements the quantitative results by contextualising the findings. By applying a theoretical framework of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and banal globalism (Szerszynski & Urry 2002), the study shows that while generic and decontextualised global imagery is relatively prevalent, geographic areas outside of the Global North are rarely represented. The major finding of this study is that climate change is typically visualised using imagery of (Swedish) people - particularly activists, politicians, and children.