Unwriting and Rewriting Climate

HUM:Global Semester Lecture.

Event description

Welcome to the HUM:Global Semester Lecture where Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics Martin Reisigl and Professor of Modern German Literature Eva Horn from the University of Vienna present their own research on today’s palliative climate discourses and the “forgotten” forms of perceiving and narrating climate, and converse on the role of the Humanities in climate research.

The event is free to attend and open to all, however space is limited. Register here to secure your seat.

Speakers

Eva Horn, Professor of Modern German Literature, Department of German Studies, University of Vienna

Martin Reisigl, Associate Professor of AppliedLinguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna

Discussant

Søren Beck Nielsen, Associate Professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

Programme

13:15	Welcome and intro by Søren Beck Nielsen
13:25	Eva Horn: What was climate?
13:50	Martin Reisigl: Climate Crisis – How to elicit concern with words?
14:15	Conversation facilitated by Søren Beck Nielsen
14:45	Audience Q&A
15:00	Farewell

Eva Horn

Abstract: What was climate?

Instead of focusing on climate change, as defined by the natural sciences, I want to focus on a genealogy of the meanings and perceptions of climate as such. „Climate" was a term that related to the body, locations, and cultures. It described the link between a geographical environment, its inhabitants and their ways of living. People understood climate, weather, and the states of the air around them not as an externality or a resource, but as a medium of life, a condition that shaped their health, their society and their identities. Only a view from the humanities can retrieve this „forgotten" dimension of the air and thus help to conceptualize a new relation to it.

Bio

Eva Horn is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Department of German at the University of Vienna. Her areas of research include literary and cultural history from the 18th to the 21st century, most recently disaster imagination, the Anthropocene and the historical transformations of the notion of “climate”. Together with the geologist Michael Wagreich, she is the founder and director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network. Since 2024, she has been a member of the Anthropocene Working Group.

Eva Horn is the author of The Secret War. Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (Northwestern University Press, 2013), The Future as Catastrophe (Columbia University Press, 2018), and, together with Hannes Bergthaller: The Anthropocene - Key Issues for the Humanities (Routledge, 2020). She has recently published Klima. Eine Wahrnehmungsgeschichte (Fischer, 2024).

Martin Reisigl

Abstract: Climate Crisis – How to elicit concern with words?

Up to now, it is mainly the social sciences that have set the tone in public and scientific meta-reflections on the role of communication in dealing with the climate crisis. This leads to particularities that annoy a linguistic perspective. The peculiarities include a linguistically implausible concept of narrative or storytelling. As an overstretched concept, a misconception of “narratives” can even favour climate change scepticism. In this lecture, I want to specify the role of narratives in the discourse on the climate crisis from a linguistic point of view. In doing so, I embed narratives in a wider text-linguistic and pragma-linguistic framework that distinguishes a total of five patterns of textualization: description, narration, explanation, argumentation and instruction. If we are aware of the diversity of these textual patterns, we can more easily apply the rhetorical principle of tua res agitur, i.e. “touch” people and tell them that climate and the climate crisis are about their very own matter. In this sense, I shall follow up Eva Horn’s point from a linguistic perspective.

Bio

Martin Reisigl is an Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Vienna. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics. His research interests include critical discourse studies, text linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, politolinguistics, ecolinguistics, rhetoric, language and history, argumentation analysis, and semiotics.

He has published six books and more than 150 linguistic contributions. Recent co-edited books include Diskursgrammatik [Discourse Grammar] (2025); Sprachenpolitik in Österreich. Bestandsaufnahme 2021 [Language policy in Austria. Stocktaking 2021] (2024); Klima in der Krise – Kontroversen, Widersprüche und Herausforderungen in Diskursen über Klimawandel [Climate in Crisis – Controversies, Contradictions and Challenges in Discourses on Climate Change]’ (2020); ‘Diskursanalyse und Kritik [Discourse Analysis and Critique] (2019); Discursive Representations of Controversial Issues in Medicine and Health (2019); Sprache und Geschlecht. Band 1 & 2 [Language and Gender: Volume 1 & 2 (2017); Diskurs – semiotisch. Aspekte multiformaler Diskurskodierung [Discourse – semiotically. Aspects of multiformal discourse coding]’ (2017).