Boundary Policing in Climate Justice Media: Comparative Cases from Uganda, Brazil, and Mexico

Climate justice debates increasingly unfold within media systems that do more than circulate environmental information; they also regulate who is recognized as a credible producer of climate knowledge. Across contemporary climate discourse, actors grounded in Indigenous knowledge, community testimony, territorial defense, and environmental advocacy frequently encounter forms of legitimacy management that position their claims as emotional, ideological, or misleading before substantive engagement with their evidence occurs. Drawing on a multilingual comparative dataset of documentary, institutional, media, and advocacy materials from Uganda, Brazil, and Mexico, the article examines how recurrent labels associated with emotion, activism, and misinformation shape the public credibility of climate justice actors within mediated discourse. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis traces how these labels circulate across media reporting, governmental communication, platform infrastructures, and institutional discourse. The findings reveal that climate justice communication is structured through recurrent regimes of epistemic classification that precondition how Indigenous, experiential, and advocacy-grounded knowledge enters public discourse, organizing credibility itself through labels associated with emotion, activism, and misinformation.