Social awareness campaigns are known to make use of metaphor and metonymy in creative ways to disseminate information quickly and persuasively to a wide audience. With the escalating impacts of climate change on different communities and regions around the world, long-standing global environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, have continued to produce campaigns for climate action. Since 2019, newer grassroots activism movements, such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future, have also emerged and gained significant visibility in the media due to their public campaigning and protests, which between 2019 and 2021 included a series of influential youth strikes and social media campaigns.
This dissertation examines the uses of metaphor and metonymy in the public campaign discourse of environmental NGOs and climate activism movements. It also investigates via online surveys and face-to-face interviews the effects of such uses on audience engagement. The research focuses specifically on poster campaigns by NGOs and on protest banners shared on social media by climate activism movements.
The findings identify the main metaphorical and metonymic frames in the campaigns and show that different kinds of creative uses of metaphor and metonymy in the discourse guide the ways in which adults and young people talk and think about issues such as climate change and plastic pollution. The research has implications for cognitive linguistics, environmental communications, and young people’s climate change education.
Niamh O'Dowd successfully defended her dissertation on 28 March 2025.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: "An account of the recent theoretical developments and discussions within metaphor studies"
Evaluation committee
- Associate Professor Iina Hellsten, LUT University (first opponent)
- Professor Christopher Hart, Lancaster University (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Thomas Wiben Jensen, Syddansk Universitet
Chair of the defence
Supervisors
- Professor Ljiljana Saric
- Co-supervisor was Professor Jeannette Littlemore (University of Birmingham)