Intersecting discourses of death and the climate crisis

This chapter centres on the discussion of the discourses of death constructed within climate crisis parascience. Opening with a discussion and contextualisation of literature on discourses of death and climate crisis, this chapter presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the lemma DEATH and its collocates in a corpus of academic blogs about the climate crisis. The study reveals a number of different ways in which death is socially constructed, signalling a propensity for abstracting and naturalising death in the climate crisis. The discussion of findings unpacks the potential impact of such a discursive construction of death on knowledge dissemination, points to possible future studies on death and climate discourse and offers a critical perspective on dominant and counter-perspectives that emerge from the data.