Hanna Morris
Assistant Professor, School of the Environment
Hanna E. Morris is an assistant professor in the School of the Environment with research interests in climate change media and communication, culture and climate politics, transnational climate movements, and authoritarianism and the climate crisis.
Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed her PhD.
Currently, she is working on a book tentatively entitled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power. She is also the co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) headquartered at Brown University.
Morris’s current work explores two major areas of inquiry: (1) the production of climate discourse and knowledge, where she examines how the causes, risks, and proposed responses to the climate crisis are conceptualized and communicated across different cultural contexts, and (2) the emergence of transnational climate movements, where she examines how transnational coalitions of climate activists resist, negotiate, and contest exclusionary regimes of governance and power.
Morris is specifically interested in how eco-socialist, Indigenous, and youth-led climate justice movements leverage and combine traditional and digital technologies, platforms, and strategies to produce media and organize across borders.
Through media analyses and ethnographic interviews with activists, she is tracing how, why, and where radical climate counter-discourses are forming and with what impact on climate policymaking and politics.
Her research and writing have been published in various academic journals and popular media outlets including the Journal of Environmental Media, Environmental Communication, Media Theory, Politique Américaine, Reading The Pictures, and Earth Island Journal. She also co-edited the book entitled, Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (Routledge, 2021).
Her scholarship has been recognized by the 2021 IAMCR Stuart Hall Award, New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences.