While calls for critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship in environmental communication (EC) abound, few articles discuss what this may practically entail. With this article, we aim to contribute to a discussion in EC about the methodological implications of such scholarship. Based on our combined experience in EC research and drawing from a variety of academic fields, we describe six methodological dilemmas that we encounter in our research practice and that we believe are inherent to such scholarship. These dilemmas are (1) grasping communication; (2) representing others; (3) involving people in research; (4) co-producing knowledge; (5) engaging critically; and (6) relating to conflict. This article does not offer solutions to these complex dilemmas. Rather, our dilemma descriptions are meant to help researchers think through methodological issues in critical, engaged and change-oriented EC research. The article also helps to translate the dilemmas to the reality of research projects through a set of questions, aimed to support a sensitivity to, and understanding of, the dilemmas in context.

In this paper we explore in which ways and to what extent Swedish visitor centres in protected sites work as forums for public deliberation on environmental issues, such as nature conservation and natural resource management. By hosting deliberations on nature in nature the deliberation process is connected to its materiality. Nature interpretation sessions at three such centres, called naturum, were analysed to achieve a picture that displays the range of content and formats of these guided tours. To explore their deliberative democratic potential, we also examine how these nature interpretation sessions relate to societal and democratic issues in different ways. The conclusions are that naturum has an underdeveloped capacity to serve as a communicative forum for public deliberation on the environment and that the new national guidelines for naturum may contribute to renewed roles of the guide and the visitor in interpretive sessions, in which the citizen will be in focus. Author Biography Elvira Caselunghe is a PhD student in Environmental Communication at the Department of Urban and Rural Studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Her thesis investigates deliberative democracy in the context of nature conservation.