Matthew C. Nisbet

Matthew C. Nisbet

Associate Professor of Communication, Northeastern University

Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Public Policy, and Urban Affairs  at Northeastern University. Nisbet studies the role of communication and advocacy in policymaking and public affairs, focusing on debates over over climate change, energy, and sustainability. Among awards and recognition, Nisbet has been a Visiting Shorenstein Fellow on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, a Health Policy Investigator at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a Google Science Communication Fellow. In 2011, the editors at the journal Nature recommended Nisbet's research as “essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate change debate,” and the New Republic highlighted his work as a “fascinating dissection of the shortcomings of climate activism."

Back in January, when a coalition of Big Industry CEOs and environmental groups got together to urge Congress and the President to pass “cap and trade” legislation on global warming […]
With their short term focus on the state primaries, GOP candidates are jockeying for favor from the right wing of the Republican party, and somewhere Democratic strategists are probably smiling.It […]
In a column last year, I detailed the historical trajectory in the U.S. of frames on nuclear energy, with images moving from very positive interpretations centered on social progress and […]
The Golden Rule in politics is never promise something you can’t deliver. In 1997 Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol and committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 […]
War metaphors have long been employed in science, ranging from the “War on Cancer” to the “War on Science” itself. These frame devices help draw attention to an issue, and […]
As I’ve chronicled at this blog, the IPCC report was a massive failure as a communication moment. The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the wider public […]
Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the announcement of the cloned sheep Dolly. While the U.S. press largely passed on the moment, the Canadian and British media paid […]