Making Sense of Climate Change: The Challenges and Promises of Embodied Climate Journalism

ABSTRACT This article analyses examples of how journalists use their bodies and draw from their senses in climate reporting published in Canada between 2019 and 2024. Francoeur’s arguments for “bodying the journalist” are used in this paper as a conceptual framework to investigate the promises and challenges of embodied climate witnessing by journalists and define characteristics of journalists’ embodiment in storytelling (Francoeur, C. 2021. “Bodying the Journalist. (Reprint.).” Brazilian Journalism Research 17 (1): 202–227. https://doi.org/10.25200/BJR.v17n1.2021.1354). Through discourse analysis of 51 stories, key characteristics of embodiment in storytelling are identified, including discussing and interrogating first-hand experiences, gauging change or difference through the senses, and situating bodily experiences alongside scientific and future-oriented discourses. This article suggests that when journalists use their bodies to share how they feel when exposed to extreme conditions or events as a result of climate change, their stories can contribute to a shared public record of what climate change feels like as it happens. Embodied reporting can in turn make journalists co-subjects of their stories, testing journalistic norms related to objectivity and distance.