British Museum’s discourse on climate change

Abstract

Discourses on the problem of climate change are regularly produced by representatives of the museum sector, particularly the British Museum, which is active in preserving its collections from the negative effects of climate change. Considering that the British Museum's discourse on climate change is insufficiently covered in the literature, this article presents a quantitative study aimed at analyzing the museum's discourse on this relatively underrepresented issue. Methodologically, the study is based on the role of language in communicating climate change to the general public. Specifically, the research relies on the study of frequently used vocabulary related to climate change, which provides a deep understanding of how the British Museum communicates the issue of climate change to its visitors. Given these considerations, the study analyzes the British Museum's climate change discourse for the presence of high-frequency words and keywords in context (KWIC) related to the problem of climate change to identify possible patterns of their use. The results show that the British Museum's climate change discourse is characterized by a number of high-frequency words related to research, art collections, climate change, sustainable development, and sustainable practices. Lexical units prototypically associated with the climate problem (e.g., CO2 emissions, temperature rise, and global warming) are not among the top ten most frequently used words in the corpus. Instead, the discourse is structured by actively used self-mentions and self-references, such as 'British', 'Museum', 'our', and 'we'. This finding is relatively new, as it has not been reported in previous studies of museum sector communication on climate change. It can be concluded that the British Museum's climate change discourse is consistent with similar discourses of British corporate and political actors who view the problem of climate change through the discursive lens of self-reference, research efforts to mitigate negative impacts, and sustainable practices to counter the climate crisis.