Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement By ...

2006; Toker, 2005). Given that climate change policy is the antithesis of an issue that is likely to be resolved by consensus decision making, citizen dissent emerges as extraordinarily important.

Political struggles, be they more or less apparent, are inscribed in a diversity of communication practices, from political speeches to mainstream and alternative media and artistic forms. As suggested by numerous scholars (e.g., Fairclough, 2003; Ivie, 2001; Wodak, 2011)—whose understandings of discourse do not necessarily coincide—discursive processes can contribute to solidifying the political status quo but can also help transform it. On the one hand, certain discursive constructions sediment, harden, and become dominant, appearing natural and objective. They constrain the range of legitimate political options, what is viewed as acceptable, doable, and thinkable at a given moment in a given society. On the other hand, it is (almost) always possible to challenge and modify political ideas and political arrangements through alternative discourses that may be created and promoted by certain individuals, groups, or critical communities. Political and institutional change takes place when hegemonic discourses are delegitimated and alternative ones gain social acceptance.

In agonistic politics, discourse is seen as fundamentally constitutive of the social. In fact, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) notion of discourse is not limited to language but encompasses all social phenomena. In their antiessentialist view of the social world, the meaning of objects and actions is constructed through changing systems of difference. Partial (and temporary) fixation of meaning occurs through “articulatory practices” that involve the construction of “nodal points,” but it allows different discourses to emerge that may challenge and modify understandings of the world. This poststructuralist approach leaves space for agency. Social subjects are inscribed in a diversity of communication practices that create different subject positions. However, subjects have room to question and modify dominant discourses, including their role therein. Because individual and group identities, including one’s condition