Oil and gas companies utilize artificial intelligence and advertising technology (ad-tech) to influence public discourse on climate and energy issues. Through contracts with public relations and advertising agencies, these companies access programmatic advertising: the automated generation, purchase, and display of digital ads in real time based on user queries and other targeting signals. These practices enable 'algorithmic interception', the strategic positioning of narratives within algorithmically mediated information environments. This article examines algorithmic interception in the context of greenwashing by analyzing Google Search advertising strategies used by Canada's Pathways Alliance (now the Oil Sands Alliance). From a corpus of 1142 paid keywords and more than 15 000 organic keywords, we analyzed 1149 advertisements and 131 high-ranking organic results collected between 2022 and 2024. We found that Pathways Alliance purchased search terms related to climate policy and solutions, such as 'carbon tax,' 'climate action incentive,' and 'net-zero,' with the result that its advertisements appeared alongside or above results for government programs, regulatory agencies, and climate science. In practice, this reshaped the online environment in which people sought information on climate questions and raised concerns about greenwashing. As one of the first studies to examine programmatic advertising in climate communication, we identify information patterns that are consistent with contemporary greenwashing as well as significant barriers to transparency and accountability inside these systems. There are significant information asymmetries created by the opacity of platforms such as Google, which withhold audience targeting and ad placement details from public scrutiny. As large language model-based search and generative engine optimization emerge as the next frontier for algorithmic interception, the need for independent tools to audit how climate narratives are surfaced will only intensify.

This study examines the evolution of (anti)woke discourse in debates within the Canadian House of Commons from 2019 to 2023, analyzing how “conceptual flipsiding” and moral panic operate to transform democratic language into tools of illiberal politics. Our critical discourse analysis of Hansard transcripts identifies three key themes: the semantic shift of woke from social awareness to authoritarianism, the strategic redefinition of woke by Conservative MPs — led by party leader Pierre Poilievre — to construct a moral panic around an anti-Canadian ideological Other, and inadequate attempts by MPs from other parties to challenge this negative framing. We argue that the discursive weaponization of woke demonstrates how political actors appropriate and invert democratic language to advance illiberal agendas while maintaining democratic legitimacy. This Canadian case illuminates broader patterns in how democratic language is manipulated across national contexts while revealing how ineffective counter-frames can inadvertently legitimize anti-democratic action within democratic institutions.

Digital authoritarianism hinges on algorithmic regimes that turn instability into controlled flux: perpetual recategorization that steers behavior and fuels predictive governance. Paradoxically, these same reflexive loops contain their own undoing: when flooded with structured, self-referential contradictions, adaptive classifiers collapse into recursive failure. This essay unpacks the algebraic mechanics of Lefebvre's reflexive control theory and demonstrates how its processes can be repurposed as a counter-flux insurgency, collapsing predictive governance from within by targeting its classification loops rather than merely injecting noise. Building on Cheney-Lippold's work on algorithmic governance, we argue that flux here is harnessed, rather than resisted, to weaponize uncertainty, shape predictable reactions, consolidate power, and ultimately enable digital authoritarian governance.

Net-zero plans, or the target of negating an organization's carbon emissions by 2050, have proliferated among large oil and gas companies. These plans have led to misleading and unverifiable claims to climate protection and have spurred concerns by researchers about greenwashing. This article examines net zero greenwashing using the case of Pathways Alliance, a coalition of six companies representing 95 % of oil sands production in Canada, one of the world's largest oil reserves. Drawing on a corpus of documents (n = 183) spanning a two-year period, including materials from the coalition's advertising and public relations campaign, we evaluate Pathways Alliance's public communication for indicators of net-zero greenwashing. We identify instances of selective disclosure and omission, misalignment of claim and action, displacement of responsibility, non-credible claims, specious comparisons, nonstandard accounting, and inadequate reporting. There is also evidence that their publicity campaign extends beyond the materials usually collected and assessed for greenwashing by researchers. The article calls for further research into net zero communication and an expanded conception of greenwashing able to account for the role of digital platforms, public relations, and sector-wide alliances in strategically coordinated climate communication.

The concept of the Synthetic is developed to trace and trouble the prevailing popular mythology of Alberta's oil sands and place the omnipresence of petro-hegemony into focus in a time of crisis and transition. The Synthetic is theorized as a period of petroculture beginning in the late 1960s with the rise of Alberta's oil sands industry together with a rise in oil sands narratives, docudrama, and the emergence of mediated or synthetic politics reliant upon processed images. Attention focuses on three mediated moments within the Synthetic beginning with the banned 1977 CBC docudrama The Tar Sands and the reaction of Premier Peter Lougheed. This signals the power and grip of oil's hegemony. Second, the short film Synergy produced for Expo 86 captures the thickening of synthetic culture and oil's saturation of the public imagination. Finally, the controversy manufactured by Alberta's Canadian Energy Centre over the animated film Bigfoot Family suggests petro-hegemony's loosening grip.

Mediatisation is a meta-process whereby media have gained in importance in all societal areas and by which the media surroundings of people become increasingly complex. Yet, in tandem with media’s increasing importance, especially digital media, are the immense material socio-ecological effects of mediatisation. Consequently, this chapter argues that scholars interested in mediatisation must do more to acknowledge and understand mediatisation’s socio-ecological connection with and effect on the climate. To make this argument we begin with a brief survey of climate change-focussed scholarship within media and communications through the lens of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication. Our review also makes clear that within mediatisation research, climate change has mainly been dealt with as an issue of mediated discourse and thereby relevant as media content. Yet we argue that mediatisation scholars must also view mediatisation as a material process that contributes to climate change. As such, the bulk of the chapter takes a material perspective on mediatisation and climate change with a specific focus on energy consumption within the production and appropriation of digital media. We conclude with a call to acknowledge mediatisation’s link to climate change to understand better and make visible mediatisation’s socio-ecological effects on the climate.

This article examines the political controversy around the banned 1977 CBC docudrama _The Tar Sands_, which portrays the personal and political struggle of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed to secure the Syncrude agreement to develop Alberta’s bitumen sands. Immediately following the docudrama’s broadcast, Lougheed launched a lawsuit which ultimately resulted in the show’s expulsion from CBC archives. While the CBC docudrama sought to dramatize and elevate political critiques of the tar sands, Lougheed’s litigious reaction quickly buried them, obfuscating the real possibility that The Tar Sands—while a work of fiction—portrays the genesis of Alberta’s corporate capture by foreign oil.

Mediatization remains a key concept for theorizing how our ever-evolving and intensifying media and communications environment underwrites and (re)constructs our social world, yet the socio-ecological effects of mediatization processes remain relatively unacknowledged within this research field. However, mediatization must be conceptualized as a cogent process whose impact extends beyond the confines of the “media environment” to the natural environment. We make this argument by reviewing how three dominant traditions of mediatization scholarship: (a) institutionalist, (b) cultural/social constructivist, and (c) materialist conceptualize “the environment.” We argue that scholars rarely acknowledge the materialist dimension of mediatization despite it being a fundamental aspect of mediatization processes. Consequently, we bring discourse surrounding the materiality of mediatization to the fore by drawing on theories of materiality from media and communication studies in general and highlighting three material dimensions of mediatization processes in particular: (a) resources, (b) energy, and (c) waste. In doing so, we make explicit the implicit material dimensions of mediatization processes that have been largely overlooked but are directly linked to how we understand, theorize and react to the societal, cultural, economic, environmental transformations brought about by media.

This study's exhaustive content analysis (N = 538) examines how Canada's mainstream news media covered the nascent yellow vest movement from the first Canadian protests in December 2018 culminating in the February 2019 cross-country United We Roll convoy. We demonstrate that Protest Paradigm scholarship does not offer a useful analytic for understanding the coverage of this right-wing social movement whose tactics were banal and law abiding. Furthermore, we argue that Canadian news media coverage of the protest movement was largely uncritical and decidedly hegemonic, raising questions about normative watchdog conceptions of the news media in Canadian democracy.

In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.

The oil industry is a focal point in discussions of climate change. However, environmental social science tends to view the oil sector as homogeneous in relation to climate change and energy futures. In this context, we ask: What is the range of energy futures that are envisioned and articulated through oil industry events in different operating regions? How do the energy futures articulated within oil industry events relate to issues of climate change and decarbonization? We use an event ethnography approach to analyse oil industry events in St. John's, Canada; Stavanger, Norway; and Aberdeen, Scotland. Here we show diverse orientations to climate change and energy futures, which we categorize as avoidance, persistence, and transformation. Energy futures research on energy and climate change often lacks engagement with social scientific perspectives. Our analysis sets out a framework for expanding the contribution of social science research on climate change and energy systems.

To better understand the historical trajectory of the policing of Nuit Debout, in this article we argue that the reflexive relationship between police and protest tactics is heavily mediated by the presence of the press and by the emergence of digital technologies. Our analysis focuses on three sets of reflexive activist practice: (a) challenging media representations—the adaptations and innovations that respond to dominant media framing of police–protester relations; (b) “sousveillance” and police monitoring—the recording and monitoring of police violence and the public education around the police’s use of force; (c) civic forensics and data aggregation—the gathering, analyzing, and collectivizing of citizen-generated data. Although not intended as a taxonomy, these groups of practices are offered as conceptual lenses for critically examining how activists’ tactical repertoires for protesting police adapt and evolve, building on each other to challenge the representational, legal, and material dimensions of state power as it manifests in police–protester relations.

Background This article uses basic thematic content analysis (n = 80) and qualitative visual analysis to examine how still advertisements produced by Canada's oil sands industry changed between 2006 and 2015. Analysis The article argues that early industry advertisement campaigns had a strong environment focus with the objective of linking industry's interest in oil with a visual commitment to preserving, reclaiming, and restoring the natural environment. Conclusions and implications In subsequent campaigns, however, industry is shown to undertake a multidimensional campaigning strategy, the most prominent of which is lifestyle messaging that celebrates oil's ubiquity in consumer culture. The shift to "selling oil sands without oil sands" highlights the need for scholars to widen the aperture of what is traditionally considered environmental imagery from the natural environment to the human-made environment.

This chapter concludes the volume by highlighting key themes that have run through the book and the case studies of diverse contemporary and historical protest camps contained within it. The chapter recognises that protest camps have come into being motivated by a diverse range of political imperatives and that these political motivations, as much as local context, shape the form that specific protest camps take. The conclusion reaffirms the importance of studying the infrastructural arrangements through which protest camps function. It highlights several of the contradictions posed by protest camping – both around the valorisation of territory and the act of camping itself, and the tensions arising out of attention to social reproduction and care within camps. Finally, the conclusion reflects on some of the gaps in existing research highlighted by the book, and outlines priority areas for future protest camps research.

The book’s second section - ‘Occupying and Colonizing’ - addresses a different set of spatial politics posed by protest camps. The authors are concerned here with the politics of occupying (public) space for protest and the tensions that can arise from this. Urban protest camps, in particular, frequently seek to occupy public space in order to draw attention to the policies of political and economic elites. The authors question how certain ‘publics’ are brought into being by protest camps, whilst the existence of others might be elided or erased. This section addresses the constitutive power of protest camps as a political and communicative space. Here, the spatial character of a protest camp as its own sphere of life and communication creates a disposition between the two, something that leads to various relationships from clear cut antagonism between ‘the camp’ and ‘the outside’ to more heterotopic overlaps, as well as more blurred boundaries in communication and action.