A graph showing rising global temperatures can make some people feel anxious, others angry, and a few feel nothing at all — and those emotional responses determine whether they take action on climate change. This research examines how data visualisations like charts and maps trigger emotions that either mobilise or fail to mobilise people in the UK and Poland. Most studies treat data graphics as neutral information delivery tools, ignoring the emotional reactions that actually drive behaviour. The project fills that gap by treating emotions as central to how audiences engage with climate data. If successful, the findings will give NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF concrete insights into which visual formats spur action in different demographic groups and national contexts. This could reshape how climate communicators design everything from public information campaigns to policy briefings, making them more effective at turning data into engagement. The work also opens a new line of inquiry into how race, ethnicity, and inequality shape who feels moved by data visualisations — and who gets left out.
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??My ESRC-funded doctoral research offers original insights into audiences’ emotional responses to data visualisations or datavis (graphs, charts and maps) and how these responses play a role in mobilising participation in two different national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. Understanding the role emotions play in engagements with graphic representations of data is important, because there is an increased circulation of data through visual representations in everyday life in topics ranging from climate change and elections to Covid-19 distribution and social inequalities, and because emotions are vital components for making sense of these data. ?My PhD research offers a means of exploring how datavis can encourage diverse audiences to think and feel differently about urgent social issues such as climate change, and mobilise them to act. As well as offering empirical data about emotional responses and social impacts of datavis, the project makes a conceptual intervention and argues that climate change datavis can trigger multiple, simultaneous, and often contradictory emotions. These emotions play an important role in mobilising audiences to participate in datafied democracies; and they do so in different ways, depending on geographical context and demographic characteristics. ?Core activities of this fellowship are directed towards disseminating key findings from my research. This will involve submitting a paper for a high impact journal that will be co-developed with six key NGOs: Greenpeace UK, Greenpeace Poland, WWF UK, WWF Poland, Climate Science Poland, and Carbon Brief UK. It also includes presentation of the findings at an international conference, and co-producing two reports with the NGOs to enhance societal impact. These reports will be co-developed through in-person meetings in London and Warsaw, allowing practitioners to identify key challenges related to audience engagement with climate datavis. ?These outputs will highlight the social implications of climate change datavis and contribute to interdisciplinary debates on datavis in society, climate change communication and engagement, and sociology of emotions. The reports will be freely shared with NGOs, published on relevant platforms, and disseminated to climate communication experts, policymakers, and datavis practitioners. By ensuring accessibility beyond academic audiences, this fellowship will bridge the gap between research and practice, equipping NGOs with actionable insights to refine their communication strategies and enhance public engagement with climate change data. ?These matters are important not only for key stakeholders of this study, but also to other datavis professionals and designers, climate communication experts, and policymakers in the UK and Poland. The fellowship enables me to communicate my PhD findings to multiple publics, and to develop a new research agenda. ?Beyond dissemination, the fellowship will also involve developing a new research idea that engages in more depth with debates about race and ethnicity and the role of emotion, and inequalities in shaping the content and uptake of datavis. This includes preparing a draft of the ESRC New Investigator proposal. This builds not only on my PhD research findings to date showing that different national contexts and demographic differences may lead to unequal emotional engagement with datavis and mobilisation or lack thereof, but the growing social importance of datavis as a means of communication. ?This fellowship will be hosted in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. The work of this fellowship compliments the sociological research agendas in the Department and across the University that include datavis in society, inequalities and qualitative research.?
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