Danny is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development's Urban Futures Studio and Innovation Studies sections. 

His PhD research takes up the question of how the mediatization of our social worlds has (historically) transformed the conduct of environmental politics and sustainability transitions. That is to say, how have changes in the practices, institutions and infrastructures of our media landscape altered the way that discourses around the environmental crisis have unfolded? How have processes of social construction changed? As various communication theorists argue under the label of ‘communicative constructivism’ (a media-oriented elaboration of social constructivism), we cannot socially construct anything without communicating about it - yet the means of communication have radically changed over the years. Hence, how does our contemporary media environment shape the way we discuss climate problems? What novel possibilities for political agency have emerged with these changes? And for whom? How can we collectively discuss and define futures in a media landscape that is characterized by fragmentation (e.g. online echo chambers/bubbles, algorithmically determined timelines, etc.), and at a time of profound social upheaval (e.g. the rise of far-right politics worldwide, the austerity and deep inequalities birthed by neoliberal capitalism, global instability, etc.)? Empirically, the project focuses on the issue of pollution; how does, for instance, plastic pollution get politicized in our contemporary media environment? How was this historically defined? Plastics has seen a remarkable shift in its social reputation, from a celebrated material ushering in an era of ‘throwaway living’ (in 1955) to micro-plastics seeping into everyone's bloodstreams and brains. Plastics manufacturers do their best to shape the discourses around these problems with dubious (mis)information on plastics and their harms, hence polluting the information ecology through various media platforms. How do such actions impact our ability to construct a consensual social reality on which to act? How ought we respond?