The far right and environmental issues: a multimodal perspective on productivist and growth-critical stances
In this research seminar, Bernhard Forchtner considers a wide range of multimodal constructions of environmental issues by the far right. Departing from a discussion of how the far right has politicized climate change and contributed to climate obstruction via gendered, populist and nationalist discursive strategies, the talk ultimately focuses on the scarcely analyzed and arguably more complex far-right anti-productivist criticism of growth. Although far less common, the latter enables segments of the far right to put forward a thoroughly exclusionary position of what might be called ‘ethno-ecological degrowth’, a critique of economic growth and (green) capitalism at times reminiscent of the progressive degrowth movement. Adopting a framework inspired by the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse studies, the analysis draws on quantitative content analysis and qualitative visual analysis of predominantly German far-right sources to furthermore account for the persuasiveness of the visual mode in contemporary culture and communication.
As such, systematically considering the written and the visual promises a better understanding of the rhetorical force of far-right interventions in discourses about the environment. Moreover, by going beyond well-established analyses of far-right climate obstruction and/ or romanticization of the countryside, a multimodal approach offers a ‘fuller’ understanding of far-right rejection of (liberal) democracy and stresses the political ambivalence of concern for the natural environment, raising our awareness of overlaps between progressive degrowth/ environmental positions and those of the far right.
About the researcher
Bernhard Forchtner’s research focuses on the far right, especially its prose fiction and its multimodal communication about environmental issues. Following a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany), he is currently Associate Professor at the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester (UK). Recent publications include Imagining Alterative Worlds. Far-Right Fiction and the Power of Cultural Imaginaries (Routledge, 2024; with C. Kølvraa) and Visualising Far-Right Environments. Communication and the Politics of Nature (Manchester University Press, 2023).