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Browsing English Department by Author "Lim, Jerald"

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    Climate Reality On-Screen: The Climate Crisis in Popular Films, 2013-22
    (Buck Lab for Climate and Environment at Colby College and Good Energy, 2024) Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Lim, Jerald; Bellido, Dominic; Stringer, Moya; Wilson, Adria Zheng; Zhou, Zoky
    Most research that has examined climate change in film has focused on anomalous climate-focused films such as The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up, but fictional narratives have their greatest impact in the aggregate, through repetition of common settings, themes, and actions. Is the film industry as a whole helping us face and respond to the climate crisis—or avoid it? To answer this question, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson worked with five current and former students (Dominic Bellido, Moya Stringer, Adria Zheng Wilson, and Zoky Zhou) to apply a communication studies methodology to the 250 most popular films of the last decade (2013 to 2022), identifying the presence of climate c hange in a film’s story world; climate awareness; scenes with climate mentions; common climate impacts; and climate-positive and climate-negative behaviors in each film. The result is “Climate Change On-screen,” a groundbreaking systematic analysis of climate change in popular films, published by the Buck Lab for Climate & Energy at Colby College and Good Energy, a leading climate consultancy.