'Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power'

In Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025), climate media scholar Hanna E. Morris (University of Toronto) reveals how national anxieties following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 have shaped American journalistic and political interpretations of climate change in ways that severely limit how it has come to be known, imagined, and contended with. Looking at climate change reporting across prominent and ideologically diverse U.S. news publications over the past decade, the book traces how news media create an illusion of control in the present through nostalgic and heroic stories of the past. Morris identifies a new mode of reactionary politics called “apocalyptic authoritarianism” to describe the post-2016 alignment of historically privileged figures united by a common enemy of the “new” New Left and a shared appeal to fears of “total crisis.” Their antidemocratic paradigm portends national and planetary disarray if progressive social and climate justice “warriors” are not controlled at home and if “unruly masses” of climate migrants are not contained abroad. In addition to contending with the implications of apocalyptic authoritarianism, Morris also calls for more robust forms of climate journalism and politics capable of facilitating - not impeding - radically democratic responses to climate change. 

Hanna Morris will by joined by Professor Shannon Jackson (History of Art, Director of Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative) and Professor Kate O’Neil (Dept of Environmental Science, Policy & Management).

Speaker: Hanna Morris, University of Toronto