Values in the Media conference 2024: Recognising the media’s role in shaping society’s cultural values – a summary
Are we more likely to value a CEO’s quarterly profits or a community’s collective resilience? Do we celebrate individual wealth and prestige or collective wellbeing? How does the mainstream news media help shape which of these things society sees as important? Last month, media professionals gathered at the historic St Ethelburga’s in London to grapple […]
Generalised prejudice is a root cause of social and environmental crises
Social and environmental campaigning is fragmented across different ‘causes’ – poverty, biodiversity loss, racism or climate change, for example. Yet a single driver lies beneath multiple forms of social and environmental injustice. Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of most campaigning means that this driver – the strengthening, at a cultural level, of “extrinsic” values of wealth, […]
Bridging the values gap: reimagining journalism through human connection
Last month, a friend and colleague shared an article with me that cited a recent study conducted into ‘journalistic values from an audience perspective’ in Chile, the results of which recognised the “importance of the human touch in journalism”. The two academics; Mellado and Gajardo, uncovered a profound disconnect between how journalists perceive their professional […]
The Big Thing People Miss When Thinking About Values
January will mark five years since I started working at the Common Cause Foundation. A key reason why I wanted to join the organisation was its unique mission – shifting cultures away from competition, inequality and oppression, and towards regeneration, equity and harmony, by celebrating and elevating the intrinsic values that underpin our care for […]
Extrinsic motivations and the law of unintended consequences
Social and environmental campaigning is plagued by the law of unintended consequences. As Common Cause has long highlighted, campaigns and communications intended to elicit deeper expressions of social or environmental concern also influence attitudes and behaviours in seemingly unrelated domains. For example, some communications urging uptake of one environment-friendly behaviour may undermine commitment to another […]
Reflecting on Indigenous Wisdom and the Urge to Oppress: A Continuing Dialogue
Last year, we shared insights from a series of conversations we hosted with Indigenous people, exploring the potential of a social psychological model of values to support their social and environmental justice campaigns. At the time, we viewed this as the beginning of a broader, ongoing conversation. We were eager to invite voices from other […]
How should the new UK Government talk about climate action?
The public tide is turning when it comes to climate action. We know that more people than ever before consider the climate and nature crisis to be real and of the utmost importance to tackle. Despite little mention of climate change during election campaigning, we have seen MPs elected from across the political spectrum who […]
Queering Conservation: Addressing heteronormativity* in conservation practice
Early this Spring, a small group of us – mostly queer identifying, plus a couple of straight allies – spent a couple of days together in the beautiful grounds of Gregynog Hall in mid Wales, to dive deep into an inquiry of what it would mean to queer conservation. This was building on a series […]
Changing our minds means changing how we feel
Common Cause Foundation has long highlighted the ways in which movements for social and environmental change often rehearse and embed a neoliberal worldview. This may be deliberate (a strategy to assimilate responses to multiple forms of crisis within neoliberal frameworks) or it may be inadvertent (many campaigns assume that the best way to build support […]
Culture as an incubator of extrinsic values
In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, George Monbiot proposed that one (little explored) reason for the rise of Donald Trump is that Trump is “a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values”. He reminds us that our values are heavily influenced by the societies we are a part of, including the political environment. The […]