Syncretic expertise in TED Talks: Insights into environmental discourse

This paper focuses on the popularization of information related to environmental issues in media texts, with a particular focus on TED Talks. TED talks are a distinctive genre with has considerable social implications, especially when the presentations concern themes such as the environment, the understanding of which is a key determinant in the full realization of specific environmental policies. In this respect, this study suggests a critical need to go beyond the purely technical analysis of environmental issues by framing them within a wider discourse, which is more likely to influence the public at large. The paper explores a corpus of popular talks which deal with environmental issues and analyzes their macro-structural components. Methodologically, traditional genre analysis is integrated with a critical stimulus in order to unveil the strategies employed to overcome the technophilic/technophobic dichotomy which often typifies environmental discourse. The findings show the flexible and dynamic nature of TED Talks. Their communicative success lies specifically in the ability of the presenters to attract the audience’s attention by making use of different communicative strategies and drawing on different forms of expertise, within the specific structural constraints imposed by this genre.