Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2023, 59(5): 487-512 | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2023.016

‘People Are Dying, and They Will Be Dying’: Drought Stories, Cultural Codes and Environmental Discourses

Karel Čada
Fakulta podnikohospodářská, Vysoká škola ekonomická v Praze
Fakulta humanitních studií, Univerzita Karlova, Praha

This article focuses on narratives of drought in Czech media discourses. Proceeding from the perspective of cultural sociology, it describes drought as a complex cultural field and a collective representation that has given rise to new forms of civic responsibility and subjectivity and a rich tableau of new uncertainties and risks. Based on an analysis of 4632 articles published in the most widely read Czech newspapers (Lidové noviny, Hospodářské noviny, MF Dnes, Právo, Blesk) between 2014 and 2018, the article identifies the key media images of drought and relates them to broader environmental discourses and cultural risk patterns. The main thesis of the article is that the key tension in the current debate on global climate change is a dispute not between supporters and deniers of climate change, but between climate fatalism and administrative-expert rationality. The article shows that the environmental crisis is closely linked to and negotiated and discussed in connection with the crisis of administrative and expert institutions. A good illustration of the cultural aspects of the current drought debate in the Czech Republic is the link between the social and natural aspects of environmental problems and the different imaginations of both nature and society.

Keywords: environmental sociology, climate change, expertise, discourse analysis, culture codes, media

Received: August 4, 2020; Revised: February 16, 2023; Accepted: February 21, 2023; Prepublished online: February 24, 2023; Published: November 6, 2023  Show citation

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Čada, K. (2023). ‘People Are Dying, and They Will Be Dying’: Drought Stories, Cultural Codes and Environmental Discourses. Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 59(5), 487-512. doi: 10.13060/csr.2023.016
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