Thesis Defence: Reading Wildfire: Mainstream Media, Social Media, and Community Sense-Making in Western Canada 2016-2023

Blair Visscher, supervised by Dr. Greg Garrard, will defend their thesis titled “Reading Wildfire: Mainstream Media, Social Media, and Community Sense-Making in Western Canada 2016-2023″ in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Sustainability theme.

An abstract for Blair Visscher’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.

Abstract

Canada’s escalating wildfire seasons have been accompanied by a parallel crisis in disaster communication: the progressive displacement of community voice from mainstream media coverage and a corresponding rise in institutional distrust and conspiracy framing on social media. This thesis investigates why rural community trust in emergency management institutions declined between 2016 and 2023, and whether mainstream and social media systems reflected, or produced, that collapse. The investigation compares three Western Canadian wildland interface fires, the 2016 Fort McMurray (Horse River) fire, the 2021 White Rock Lake fire, and the 2023 Bush Creek East fire, using an interdisciplinary mixed-methods design that combines critical discourse and frame analysis of 109 mainstream news articles with a multi-method analysis of Facebook discourse comprising sentiment analysis (the NRC Valence-Arousal-Dominance lexicon and Understanding Emotion Dynamics framework), narrative network analysis, and ecocritical close reading of viral posts. Findings show that emergency-official sourcing in mainstream coverage rose from 27 to 82 per cent of articles across the three fires while resident and evacuee voices fell from 30 to 18 per cent, and that the community solidarity frame present in early coverage disappeared entirely by 2023. On Facebook, the affective register of community storytelling shifted correspondingly, from solidarity and institutional trust in 2016 to anger and a consolidated conspiratorial narrative network in 2023, a transformation driven not by fire severity but by the interaction of platform algorithm changes privileging emotionally charged content, pandemic-era erosion of institutional trust, and Meta’s 2023 removal of Canadian news content from Facebook and Instagram in response to the Online News Act. The thesis develops vernacular environmental storytelling on Facebook as an original theoretical concept describing the community-generated, affective sense-making practices through which people narrate lived experiences of ecological crisis, and argues that the erosion of community voice in mainstream media and the escalation of distrust on social media are mutually reinforcing rather than independent processes. It concludes with a federal policy brief recommending repeal of the Online News Act in favour of direct public funding mechanisms for local journalism, arguing that platform governance decisions during declared emergencies constitute a public safety, not merely commercial, concern.