Floods and fires: Reciprocal metaphorical mappings in crisis response
February 14, 2025
Psychologists, sociologists, linguists and many others have studied how people respond to extreme weather events, such as floods or wildfires. Some linguists have been interested in particular in analysing the use and impact of metaphors. When we studied the 2021 German floods, Rusi Jaspal and I found that floods were either metaphorically framed as human, …
Wildfires and wild liars
January 13, 2025
I have written about wildfires and bushfires and climate change since 2012, here, here, here, here and here, for example. I should have written about the Paradise Fire or the Maui Fire, but I didn’t. And now we have the awful Southern California urban wildfires. What can one say? Fortunately, people more knowledgeable than I …
The sky is falling and the trees are crying: Reflections on extreme weather
May 6, 2022
For some weeks now, I wanted to write something about ‘rain bombs’, a relatively new weather/climate phenomenon and metaphor – but I didn’t get round to it. Then, last week, when I sat down to write, thoughts about strong rain were displaced by thoughts about fire and heat. In the end I decided to write …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
Find, follow, join us
