Neil Ever Osborne is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University.

As a social scientist and public scholar, he is interested in examining the converging social and environmental issues that narrate our times in a changing — and warming — world, along with the effective means to communicate these issues to the public and critical stakeholders to invite meaningful action.

More specifically, Osborne’s research aims to understand better the media’s effect on audiences’ real-life morals, values, and behaviours — this includes how narratives of all kinds can more effectively foster sustained engagement with solutions to the climate crisis.

In this pursuit, he uses an evidence-based approach to inform the research questions in the projects noted below.

• Climate communications
• Reframing environmental discourse
• Visual storytelling and photography
• Biological and cultural diversity (i.e., the biosphere and ethnosphere) and societal pressures that endanger both
• Protected area designation and conservation (i.e., primarily in the polar and tropical regions)

• Narrative theory: Overview (see Herman, 2007; Abbott, 2021); Narrative empathy (see Keen, 2006); Narrative paradigm (see Fisher, 1984); Public sphere (see Habermas, 1991); Storytelling (see Benjamin in Hale, 2006); Narrative structure (see Barthes, 1975)
• Affect theory (see Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Weik von Mossner, 2017; Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023)
• Social cognitive theory (see Bandura, 1971; De Meyer et al., 2020)
• Framing theory (see Lakoff, 2010)
• Communication theory: Photography (see Sontag, 1973)

• Social science and ethnographic approaches, including experimental, survey, and in-depth interview methods
• Eye-witness reporting with a camera
• Documentary assignments
• Field expeditions to local and global locales, often remote, for wildlife mark-recapture studies