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Abstract

This chapter reviews contemporary scholarship of protest and environmental activism. Over half a century of research on environmental protest has consistently pointed to the role of media in bringing attention to environmental concerns and risk, showing how the attention of media—historically journalists working within broadcast or print newsrooms, or photographers or filmmakers—needed to be won in order for messages that highlighted risks or promoted counter-narratives to reach the wider public. In the movement-media dance, the interaction of local concerns with a distant media was vital to prove the scale of risks and the commitment of protesters. ‘Speaking out’ remains a key strategy for shifting the scale of a concern from a defined local area translocally, nationally, transnationally or globally.

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Lester, L. (2019). Counting Protest. In: Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9_2

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