Engaging Climate Crisis Through an Immersive Documentary

Our research approaches climate communication with one of the newer multi-modal forms and with an under-examined study on students. An interactive documentary titled This Is Climate Change (2018) was analyzed as an example of “eco-culture” and read by the university students at Siegen University in Germany from the perspective of “eco-affects” (Adrian and Ivakhiv, 2024). The students engaged with this chosen documentary series mainly based on whether interactivity leads to a more engaged or well-informed audience (Brannon et al. 2022, 335). The research also functions as a “climate literacy/climate change literacy” (Azevedo and Marques 2017, 4). Thus, the article hopes to contribute to engaged communication scholarship on environmental justice (Chad, 2019) and transformative communication scholarship (Brüggemann et. al. 2023).