Fuelling Extractive Populism in Canada: Social Media, Subsidized Publics & Petro-Nationalism

October 5th, 2023 6:30pm - 8:00PM

Online

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Join us for a CHBE Webinar with Shane Gunster, Robert Neubauer and Darren Fleet on extractive populism, petro-nationalism and social media in Canada. Over the past decade, the fossil fuel industry and its advocates have built robust social networks on platforms like Facebook that they have used to cultivate populist visions of extractivism as essential to the well-being of Canadians, under attack by progressive elites and imperative to defend through political mobilization. More recently, such appeals have also come to anchor far-right conspiracy narratives that stoke fear and anger about the prospect of a just transition. In this webinar, we will explore the core features of extractive populism, the use of platforms to build self-contained far-right media ecologies that can propagate industry narratives and mobilize supporters, the intersection between religion and petro-nationalism, and thoughts about developing different narratives about the country’s future.

Shane Gunster is associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. His research and teaching focus on news and advocacy communication around the politics of climate and energy, with an emphasis upon how social media platforms and alternative news media outlets engage and mobilize different publics in different ways around the climate crisis. He is the co-author (with Robert Hackett, Susan Forde and Kerrie Foxwell-Norton) of Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives (Routledge, 2017).

Robert Neubauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. His research explores the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse, public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure, and digital platforms.

Darren Fleet is a limited term lecturer at Simon Fraser University and Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His research interests include: advertising, environmental discourse, petroculture, religious social movements, and the cultural politics of fossil fuels in Canada.

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Organized by the Centre on Hate, Bias & Extremism (CHBE).

Co-sponsored by Energy Humanities, Petrocultures Research Group and Climate Commons Working Group.