DPhil Student
St Antony's College
Karl's research explores the social construction of climate change 'denialism' and non-participation in global climate change discourse. With rural, coastal North Carolina, and the Paris Agreement as twin ethnographic foci, Karl investigates how each context produces different, often conflicting forms of climate personhood whose mutual incomprehension have led to significant sociological rifts. Drawing on approaches from Science, Technology and Society (STS), Karl aims to challenge enduring deficit model thinking in policy and communication, and instead generate a symmetrical view of how climate discourses can fail to gain traction in certain public contexts. For his fieldwork, Karl spent a year in North Carolina hosted by the NC State Climate Office as a visiting Fulbright scholar. While in the US, Karl also developed his thesis as a visiting fellow of Harvard's STS Program.
Karl has a professional background in global climate politics, climate change communication, and local environmental governance. He has previously acted as a youth consultant for the Seychelles delegation at COP24, led youth climate advocacy programmes and provided social research expertise to a global consortium on common principles for voluntary carbon markets; he contributed to original research as an assistant at the climate communications NGO Climate Outreach, published in Climate Home News and Anthroposphere magazine, where he also acted as head editor. Karl also co-designed and led a Defra-funded social research project called OxAir, exploring how public-science interactions in local air quality governance can be made less hierarchical and more democratic.
Karl is also a professional photographer and writer.
Research interests: Post-truth; Just Transition; Global climate change politics; the Paris Agreement; climate change communication.
Email: Karl.dudman@sant.ox.ac.uk
Personal website: Karldudman.com
Twitter: @dudman_karl
Publications
- Dudman, K., de Wit, S. An IPCC that listens: introducing reciprocity to climate change communication. Climatic Change 168, 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03186-x
- Rowbottom, J., Graversgaard, M., Wright, I., Dudman, K., Klages, S., Heidecke, C., ... & Velthof, G. Water governance diversity across Europe: Does legacy generate sticking points in implementing multi-level governance?. Journal of environmental management, 319, 115598.(2022).
- Dudman, K. "If you think Covid-19 is a dress rehearsal, you may be at the wrong play". TORCH. (2020).
- Clarke, J., Corner, A., and Webster, R., Shaw, C., Dudman, K. Public engagement for a 1.5 °C world: Shifting gear and scaling up. Oxford: Climate Outreach. (2018).
