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This is a thesis by publication comprising four published research papers and an overarching statement which examine the language and discourse of the climate change debate in Australia since 2007. Published over the period of my candidacy, the papers individually explore a range of questions about the broader underpinning drivers of a unique period of political disruption in Australia – the so-called ‘climate wars’. Thematically, this thesis considers how the scientific urgency and moral imperative for climate change policy action, so powerful in 2007, degenerated into a rancorous political wedge that provided the catalyst for the removal of three sitting prime ministers. The thesis addresses a number of pertinent questions. What is it about climate change as a scientific, environmental, economic, psychological, social, cultural and ethical and ideological phenomenon that offers insight into this remarkable period of Australian political history? What does the political narrative of this period tell us about the taxonomy of public and political debate broadly, the changing political economy of media and its resultant impact on the relationship between governments and its citizens specifically? Given that scientific evidence of trend-breaking global temperatures is being reported in increasingly strident language, how can the discursive practices that have underpinned the Australian debate shed light on this political impasse and policy gridlock? The papers in this thesis have employed both a ‘close’ and ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, 2013) mixed methods approach to critical discourse and frame analysis. Two of the studies use the innovative computer-assisted content analysis software Leximancer (Smith & Humphries, 2006) to develop and analyse large corpuses of media data from a different perspective and from a unique place in the political timeline. Each paper employs one of these key discursive frames as a focal prism for what might be discovered about different ways of ‘knowing’ climate via the role of the language and considering the social and political function of the texts. The research ultimately highlights the power of language and the way that the framing of climate change via the media has worked to shape the political narrative, impact the public debate and direct the political action. Ultimately, understanding frames, and how they shape the communication of a contentious issue, is important for the development of effective strategic communication of significant public issues. Climate change is arguably, THE defining issue of our era.

The increased adoption of automation into various occupations strikes fear into many hearts, as people worry that robots will be able to perform their jobs more efficiently, leading to their inevitable unemployment. However, economists predict that this new technology will actually lead to a higher level of employment, although it will cause the aggregate labor share to decrease, forcing wages to decline. This paper focuses on ways in which we can recover a portion of the labor share and mitigate the decline of wages through the development of human capital via the educational system. Moreover, it seeks to understand ways in which we can exploit the jobs that will be created by automation by proposing methods to alter the educational structure to emphasize the new skills that are becoming more pertinent. My analysis provides evidence that by developing methods to encourage higher levels of educational attainment through dual degree and accelerated master’s programs, as well by decreasing the cost-exclusivity of higher education, we can both prepare future generations and reskill the current generation to succeed in this economic environment.

As global warming became a more urgent issue, the European Union (EU) nations formed the EU emission trading scheme (EU ETS) to regulate carbon emissions. The EU ETS set upper limits for each EU nation’s carbon emission levels in three distinctive phases to gradually decrease the carbon emission levels to a targeted reduction level by 2020. Throughout the paper, I will focus on how independent variables such as accumulated reserves, allocated allowances, the total outstanding supply of carbon emission rights (CERs) in the market, the demand for CERs, energy consumption, and the required reduction amount by 2020 affect the price of CER and the ratio of verified emissions to the 2020 targeted upper limit.

Given that Congressional hearings are established legislative and political information generating tools for committee members engaging in oversight, fact finding, and agenda setting, I examine whether or not hearings provide information to actors outside of government. More specifically, does testimony by corporate representatives provide new information to the stock market about the future profitability of certain firms? In this paper, I utilize a new dataset collected by Workman and Shafran (2009) that includes 3,300 witnesses (and their affiliations) who testified in business regulation hearings between 2000 and 2005. I identify 99 publicly traded firms with representatives testifying in 117 hearings, and utilize event study methodology to estimate the effects of testimony events on the daily stock returns of corresponding firms. I find that, even with the ‘expectedness’ of Congressional hearings, such events negatively impact stock returns both generally as well as with greater magnitude under certain conditions. This event effect is largest for politically sensitive firms and for hearings held in the Senate. When selecting a portfolio of firms that combines all significant conditions, I determine that the ‘upper bound’ of the effect is one-half a standard deviation in daily returns (or a change of -1.6% in prices). Congressional hearings with corporate testimony do, in fact, generate information for external actors.

This paper uses an interdisciplinary, multiperspectival approach to analyze biketivism and various anticapitalist biketivist projects in Austin, Texas, in the hopes that a “glocalized” exploration of past and current biketivist struggles can help locate potential sites for political agency in ways that more placeless rhetorical studies cannot. Because the form and content of present-day bike politics in Austin are heavily dependent on biketivism’s historically tense articulations with capitalism, a historical analysis of biketivism as an outgrowth of Progressive Era and Appropriate Technology narratives reveals its crystallization around issues of technological, spatial, and social politics. Three case studies then apply this framework to different sites within the Austin bike community: the sales rhetoric of pro-custom bike shops, the debates over installing a Bike Boulevard in downtown Austin, and the missions and forms of several bike-related cultural organizations. Together, these perspectives on Austin’s bike community indicate that the incorporation (and sometimes outright co-optation) of biketivists’ technological and spatial demands and practices into mainstream culture may fragment the movement into physical and social agendas, but this fragmentation does not necessarily silence biketivism’s more radical social politics. At least in Austin, co-optation of biketivism may paradoxically be helping biketivists meet their goal of bringing (pedal) power to the people.

The year 1996 marked the initiation of Getting America’s Students Ready for the 21st Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge. The grant program aimed to integrate technology in the field of education in the 21st century. This grant program generated many reports in an attempt to measure its success as well as to comment on the state of schools, teachers, and teacher preparation in Schools of Education in utilizing technology to improve teaching and learning. This brief paper endeavors to create a synthesis of the recent research and opinions about the introduction of technology into the classroom as proposed by this plan, and will, in some cases, call for revisions. At the same time, the writing assesses, from a perspective enriched by time, exactly how much of what was suggested by the educational experts was actually put into effect.