Climate + Culture
Team Advisor/PI
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Ph.D.
Project Description/ Research Team Goals
The Climate + Culture team is focused on media effects—how the stories we consume in our daily lives shape how we think about and respond to the world around us. This team will focus primarily on beliefs and attitudes related to the environment, and climate change in particular, but may also branch out into other areas. In terms of media forms, we will focus on fiction (short stories and potentially novels), popular music, and film. The questions we will ask are: Do stories, songs, and films that are regularly encountered by billions of people contain environmental problems and themes? If so, what kind? How does that affect how people think about and respond to the climate crisis and other urgent problems?
Issues Addressed
In obvious and not-always-obvious ways, climate change and other environmental problems are defining the twenty-first century. They are commonly thought of them as challenges for science, technology, and policy, but decades of evidence shows that the narratives we consume—in stories, songs, films, TV shows, video games, and social media—shape the way that we think and act. Or don’t act. Most attention to narratives and the environment comes from the humanities, primarily through close-readings of individual texts, but stories have their greatest effects in the aggregate, through repetition. That’s where our research comes in, attempting to answer critical environmental humanities questions via social scientific methods in a way that very few researchers in the world are doing.
Research Methods and Technology
We will be 1) applying content analysis, a common social science methodology, to short stories, novels, and films; 2) developing a taxonomy of the way that nature, the environment, and environment problems appear (or don’t appear) in popular music; and 3) developing SNETBot, a machine learning algorithm that can apply the Strategic Narratives for Environmental Transition codebook to any short story, song, or novel. (And we’ll come up with a better name for SNETBot.) We will endeavor to make our research available to the public, and all members of the Climate + Culture team will be co-authors on an any publications.
Preferred Undergraduate Interests
Open to all
Academic Majors of Interest
Though open to all, most interested in the following majors/minors:
- Media Studies
- English and Creative Writing
- Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
- Psychological Sciences
- Music
- Environmental Studies
Prior Preparation/Requisite Experience
A solid understanding of contemporary environmental problems and a love of fiction, popular music, and/or film
Compensation
Work study-eligible students may receive compensation from OURI.
Course Credit
UNIV 290.001
Team Meeting
To be determined based on the Spring 2026 course
Actively Onboarding New Members
Yes
Ready to Apply?
Use the linked Google Form to submit your application!
Contact
For more information, please email Dr. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (mjs23@rice.edu).