WWU to Host Temple University’s Patrick D. Murphy Oct. 25

Temple University Professor Patrick D. Murphy will present “From Limits to Buen Vivir: Communication and the Politics of Environmental Transition” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 25 in Academic West 203 on the Western Washington University campus as part of the Huxley Speaker Series. 

All Huxley Speaker Series events are free and open to the public.

Environmental communication scholars have asserted that, despite the mounting ecological, social and political challenges caused by human-driven climate change, mainstream communication practices have constrained action by rendering a depoliticized vision of environmental politics that places people in passive roles.

In contrast to these practices, there has been an emergence of environmental “transition discourses” which confront citizens with a rethinking of the human relationship with the earth by directing attention to the unsustainable practices encouraged by models of social life that promote consumer identities, material accumulation, and the notion that perpetual growth equals progress and by calling for a profound cultural, economic, and political transformation of dominant institutions and practices.

Patrick D. Murphy is associate dean for Research and Graduate Studies and associate professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia. His teaching and research interests include global media, media and the environment, documentary media, ethnographic method and Latin American media and cultural theory.  Murphy is author of “The Media Commons: Globalization and Environmental Discourses” and is co-editor of “Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies and Global Media Studies.”  Murphy has also translated into English articles by some of Latin America’s most prominent communication scholars. Currently, he is working on a book about media activism and environmental transition discourses.

For more information on the Huxley College Speaker Series, call (360) 650-3520. Complimentary parking is available in Parking Lot 12A after 4 p.m. on Thursdays during fall quarter.