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Speaker: Hanna Morris, Assistant Professor, School of the Environment, University of Toronto 

In this talk, Dr. Hanna E. Morris will discuss her forthcoming book entitled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025). Looking at climate change reporting across prominent and ideologically diverse U.S. newspapers and magazines over the past decade, Morris will show how national anxieties following the 2016 presidential election 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.

This talk will trace how climate news media since 2016 have created an illusion of control in the present through nostalgic and heroic stories of the past. In her book and in this talk, Morris identifies and will detail 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.”

This 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 will also propose alternative forms of climate journalism and politics capable of facilitating—not impeding—robustly democratic, inclusive, and equitable responses to climate change.