This special issue of the journal arises from the Eco-Communications Symposium held in 2022, which convened scholars to critically interrogate the intersections of environment, media, and communication from African perspectives. Drawing conceptual inspiration from Antonio López’s Ecomedia Literacy (2021), which advances an integrated understanding of media systems and ecological life, the symposium foregrounded the role of communication, storying, and affect in shaping environmental meaning, care, and engagement.
A central motivation underpinning both the symposium and this special issue was the recognition that ecomedia and environmental communication scholarship have been predominantly shaped by Global North epistemologies, resulting in the relative marginalisation of African perspectives. This collection responds to that imbalance by advancing a sustained theoretical and empirical engagement with eco-communications as it unfolds within African contexts. The contributions attend to locally grounded practices of environmental storying, affective encounters, and communicative mediation, illustrating how these processes shape relationships between people, place, and ecological systems.
The article positions African perspectives not as peripheral additions to existing frameworks, but as critical sites of knowledge production that expand, complicate, and reorient the field of eco-communications, highlighting opportunities for rethinking environmental communication through African epistemologies, lived experiences, and socio-ecological realities.
Symposium presenters shared video abstracts of their presentations. The videos can be viewed on the Imidibaniso YouTube Channel.
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Special Issue