Dialogic ecologies: producer–audience dynamics in Arabic youtube environmental communication

This article investigates how Arabic digital media communicates ecological issues through the case study of Egyptian science-edutainer Ahmed Elghandour’s YouTube program Al-Daheeh. Focusing on the 2024 episode “The Enemy of the Universe”, which addresses plastic pollution. The study combines ecolinguistics, corpus-assisted Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), and media framing theory to explore how ecological meaning is constructed, circulated, and contested. The dataset comprises the full transcript of the episode (∼4233 words) and a corpus of 13,561 tokens from 1566 YouTube comments. The analysis identifies three dominant semantic frames—technological, economic, and natural—that narrate plastic as both an innovation and a crisis, situate responsibility with corporations and governments, and foreground ecological justice. Pragmatic strategies such as vocatives, personal pronouns, and evaluative adjectives frame science as a shared conversation, redistribute agency, and empower audiences to perceive plastic as human-made and therefore transformable. Collocational patterns further expose corporate negligence and reframe responsibility beyond consumerist narratives. A complementary examination of YouTube comments reveals a polyphonic reception: while some users reproduce Al-Daheeh’s systemic critique, others deflect responsibility onto “humanity in general,” minimize or deny Egypt’s pollution problem, or transform ecological anxiety into humor and memes. The study proposes the concept of dialogic ecology to capture this interactional field, and illustrates it through the producer–audience dynamics surrounding Al-Daheeh’s episode. Dialogic ecology conceptualizes ecological communication in Arabic media not as a unidirectional transfer of knowledge but as a space in which counter-stories of accountability coexist with denial, banalization, and national identity narratives. By situating Al-Daheeh within ecolinguistic and media-framing debates, the article shows how popular Arabic science communication can democratize ecological knowledge while also highlighting the challenges of sustaining constructive environmental narratives in participatory digital spaces.