2026/03/26 by Jonna M. Yarrington · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/sas.2026.10050
openalex publication_date 2026/03/26 · openalex created_date 2026/03/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
Abstract This article examines the semiotics of epistemic politics surrounding climate change denial on Tangier Island, Virginia, a shrinking inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Using long-term ethnographic field research, the paper analyzes how islanders’ professed disbelief in climate change functions not as ignorance but as political and poetic positioning. Denial is treated as a symbolic act, not reducible to misinformation or scientific illiteracy, but shaped by classed and embodied relations with state knowledge regimes, media discourses, and environmental governance. Drawing on Peirce’s pragmatism and Jakobson’s poetics, the article frames climate denial as both an imposed stereotype from without and an identification strategy from within, connected to multiply indexed relationships. To that end, the article advances a semiotic approach to climate politics that centers affect, professed belief (creed) and epistemic stratification.