Tema Milstein | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)

Books by Tema Milstein

by Tema Milstein, José Castro-Sotomayor, Laura Bridgeman, Carlos Tarin, Melissa M Parks, Jeffrey Hoffmann, Casper G Bendixsen, Emma Frances Bloomfield, Eric Karikari, Lars Hallgren, Dakota Raynes, John Carr, Bruno Seraphin, Carrie Packwood Freeman, Julia L Ginsburg, and Rebecca Banham

Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, 2020

Use this link to join the discussion: https://www.academia.edu/s/da2195c5e5?source=link For this... more Use this link to join the discussion: https://www.academia.edu/s/da2195c5e5?source=link

For this book discussion, we've shared the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity's Introduction Chapter, Table of Contents, Endorsements, and Author Bios. We look forward to discussing the book with you! "The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving."

Please write your thoughts, questions, and comments into the discussion. We will check in regularly to respond and move the conversation forward.

Note: Routledge is offering a 25% discount code for hardcover or Ebook until June 26. Routledge code=ACR02. (Order at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840)

You may enjoy the following podcasts on the book:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ecocultural-identity/13311966

Climactic:
https://omny.fm/shows/climactic-1/gretchen-miller-tema-milstein-routledge-handbook-o

Custodians of the Planet:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/custodians-of-the/the-routledge-handbook-of-OuhdqzASWG-/

by Tema Milstein, José Castro-Sotomayor, Laura Bridgeman, David Abram, Melissa M Parks, Mariko O Thomas, Elizabeth Oriel, Toni Frohoff, Jeffrey Hoffmann, Casper G Bendixsen, Jessica Love-Nichols, Emma Frances Bloomfield, Charles Carlin, Eric Karikari, Godfried Asante, Dakota Raynes, Shilpa Dahake, Joe Quick, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Carrie Packwood Freeman, and Rebecca Banham

Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, 2020

The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more ... more The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving.

Paperback out June 2022: 20% cost of hardback +20% off w/ code FLE22 ordering through Routledge.

Introduction chapter, table of contents, and endorsements are posted here. More, including editor bios and authors, can be found at this Routledge link: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411. Please help share the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity among your networks. And please ask your libraries to purchase the book (or put it on their to-buy lists if budgets have been temporarily frozen due to Covid). The Handbook is an important resource for our times for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, policy-makers, and practitioners. The editors, Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor, are available for Q&A, interviews, guest commentary, talks, etc. Thanks for your interest and for helping to spread word!

What has been said about the Handbook:
“Intricately transdisciplinary and cross-geographical, it is the first volume of its kind to caringly craft a gathering concept, that of ecocultural identities, bringing together the social, political, and ecological dimensions of identity. What results is a treasure of insights on the politics of life, broadly speaking, and a novel toolbox for tackling effectively the damages caused by modern capitalist modes of extraction and the urgent task of Earth’s ontological repair and renewal.”
Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Too often mislabelled an ‘issue,’ the environment is in fact integral not just to everything we do but to who we are. This link between our identity and our ecology has long been recognised in many societies, but others seem to have forgotten its signal importance. This superb collection shows why all identities are ecocultural ones, and why full recognition of this is essential to all our political futures.”
Noel Castree, University of Manchester

“A smart, provocative, and original collection, the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides a definitive introduction to the constraints upon, and the contexts, formations, and impacts of, our diverse – but often unexamined – ecological selves.”
Robert Cox, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and three-time national president of the Sierra Club

“I am in complete solidarity with this book.”
Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

by Tema Milstein, Aaron Phillips, Geo Takach, Carlos Tarin, Emily Plec, Bridie McGreavy, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Leah Sprain, Karey Harrison, Joy M Hamilton, Stephen Griego, Jeffrey Hoffmann, José Castro-Sotomayor, Maggie Siebert, and Melissa M Parks

Given the urgency of environmental problems, how we communicate about our ecological relations is... more Given the urgency of environmental problems, how we communicate about our ecological relations is crucial. Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice is concerned with ways to help learners effectively navigate and consciously contribute to the communication shaping our environmental present and future. The book brings together international educators working from a variety of perspectives to engage both theory and application. Contributors address how pedagogy can stimulate ecological wakefulness, support diverse and praxis-based ways of learning, and nurture environmental change agents. Additionally, the volume responds to a practical need to increase teaching effectiveness of environmental communication across disciplines by offering a repertoire of useful learning activities and assignments. Altogether, it provides an impetus for reflection upon and enhancement of our own practice as environmental educators, practitioners, and students. Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice is an essential resource for those working in environmental communication, environmental and sustainability studies, environmental journalism, environmental planning and management, environmental sciences, media studies and cultural studies, as well as communication subfields such as rhetoric, conflict and mediation, and intercultural. The volume is also a valuable resource for environmental communication professionals working with communities and governmental and non-governmental environmental organisations.

Table of Contents

Introducing Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice Tema Milstein, Mairi Pileggi, & Eric Morgan

Section One: (Re)conceptualizing the Environmental Communication Classroom

Chapter 1. From Negotiation to Advocacy: Linking Two Approaches to Teaching Environmental Rhetoric. Garret Stack and Linda Flower

Chapter 2. Pedagogy as Environmental Communication: The Rhetorical Situations of the Classroom. Jessica Prody

Chapter 3. Environmental Communication Pedagogy: A Survey of the Field. Joy Hamilton and Mark Pedelty

Chapter 4. Breathing Life into Learning: Ecocultural Pedagogy and the Inside-Out Classroom. Tema Milstein, Maryam Alhinai, José Castro, Stephen Griego, Jeff Hoffmann, Melissa M. Parks, Maggie Siebert, and Mariko Thomas.

Section Two: Diverse Practices in Teaching Environmental Communication

Chapter 5. The Role of Social Constructionism as a Reflexive Tool in Environmental Communication Education. Lars Hallgren

Chapter 6. "Deep Impressions": The Promise and Possibilities of Intercultural Experiential Learning for Environmental Literacy and Language Attitudes. Aaron Philips

Chapter 7. Further Afield: Performance Pedagogy, Fieldwork, and Distance Learning in Environmental Communication Courses. Mark Pedelty and Joy Hamilton

Chapter 8. Arts-Based Research in the Pedagogy of Environmental Communication. Geo Takach

Chapter 9. Developing Visual Literacy Skills for Environmental Communication. Antonio Lopez

Chapter 10. Teaching Environmental Journalism Though Distance Education. Gabi Mocatta

Section Three: Transformative Practice: Nurturing Change Agents

Chapter 11. Changing Our Environmental Future: Student Praxis Through Community Inquiry. Eli Typhina

Chapter 12. Storytelling as Action. Mairi Pileggi and Eric Morgan

Chapter 13. Insider Windows in Nepal: A Critical Pedagogy for Empowering Environmental Change Agents. Grady Walker

Chapter 14. Repair Cafés - Reflecting on Materiality and Consumption in Environmental Communication. Sigrid Kannengießer

Chapter 15. Cultivating Pride: Transformative Leadership and Capacity Building in the Rare-UTEP Partnership. Carlos A. Tarin, Sarah D. Upton, Stacey K. Sowards, Kenneth C. C. Yang

Section Four: Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice Toolbox

Chapter 16. "Moral Vision Statement" Writing Assignment Instructions for Students. Carrie P. Freeman

Chapter 17. Environmental Privilege Walk: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Tema Milstein and Stephen Griego

Chapter 18. An Experiential Approach to Environmental Communication. Emily Plec.

Chapter 19. Greening Epideictic Speech. Jake Dionne

Chapter 20. Praxis-based environmental communication training: Innovative activities for building core capacities. Bridie McGreavy, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Leah Sprain, Jessica L. Thompson, Laura Lindenfeld

Chapter 21. Image(ination) and Motivation: Challenging Definitions and Inspiring Environmental Stakeholders. Mary Stroud

Chapter 22. Using Infographics. Antonio Lopez

Chapter 23. News Media Analysis. Carrie P. Freeman

Chapter 24. Newschart Assignment. Karey Harrison

Chapter 25. Speaking for/to/as Nature. Maggie Siebert

Chapter 26. Creating Emotional Proximity with Environment. Maria Clara Valencia

Chapter 27. Growing up with Animals (on screens). Gabi Hadl

Chapter 28. The Student-Run Environmental Communication Blog. Katherine Cruger

In response to continuing environmental crises in the US and globally, this volume offers a broad... more In response to continuing environmental crises in the US and globally, this volume offers a broad, richly-veined survey of some of the current pedagogical theories, rationales, and practices in the still emerging field of environmental communication. This ‘first attempt’ (2) is ambitious and is best approached as a mapping of pedagogy-as-practiced in which its 28 chapters chart a range of approaches and applied perspectives in environmental communication (EC) classrooms and in the field. Consistent with the growing international interest in EC, contributors to the volume hail from Japan, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Oman, and Canada as well as the US...

Journal Articles by Tema Milstein

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2023

As places that disrupt "business as usual," community food gardens carry the potential to experie... more As places that disrupt "business as usual," community food gardens carry the potential to experientially, critically, and restoratively recenter food systems and interconnected sustainability knowledges. Using interdisciplinary theory and practice-based observation, we zero in on the environmental planning and management space of the university campus to interpret how food gardens may not only materially change the campus landscape at a grassroots level but also act as constitutive forms of positive environmental communication. In doing so, food gardens may help realign the environmental premises of the university. At a time when universities have pressing leadership roles in rethinking the ecocultural, political, and economic dimensions of sustainable transformations of life as a whole, we illustrate how the creation of food gardens on all campuses might meaningfully and relationally reconnect university communities with the land where they work, learn, and teach, and, in the process, experientially promote ecocentric identities and empower change-making.

Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 2022

"This article considers higher education's role in climate crisis, reflecting on the potential of... more "This article considers higher education's role in climate crisis, reflecting on the potential of action-oriented pedagogy. As a reflection on practice, the authors consider a new postgraduate course, Climate Crisis and Action (CCA), launched in 2022 as one of a suite of new courses using inside-out pedagogy in one of the oldest (and most recently holistically redesigned) Master of Environmental Management (MEM) programs in Australia, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Over ten weeks, while building foundational climate literacy underscored by imperatives of justice and education, CCA prioritises student leadership, active citizenship, and professional agency for real-world impact. We detail four key elements of the course design: 1) repositioning the course convenor as academic-facilitator to empower students to see climate crisis as a shared challenge addressed through joint contribution, 2) establishing an atmosphere of collective intelligence, shared accountability, and affect-based learning, 3) designing assessments that embed solutions and pedagogy to position students as climate innovators and educators, and 4) providing leadership opportunities in real-time to support students to experience their own growing expertise and professional agency. The approach reflects two motivations: to engage students with the immediacy and urgency of climate crisis, and to extend the core function of teaching academics to support real-world problem solving, social innovation and societal transformation."
If you'd like to read the whole article, please message or email me for the pdf.

Environmental Communication, 2023

In this advanced review, we reflect on our own teaching and synthesise recent scholarship on high... more In this advanced review, we reflect on our own teaching and synthesise recent scholarship on higher education practices in order to examine the place of the teacher in environmental communication pedagogy. Most prior studies of environmental communication pedagogy have addressed on-campus or in-the-field teaching, with little attention paid to the challenges and opportunities of online or blended learning. We argue that environmental communication pedagogy must be reassessed in the context of the shift toward online instruction that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted, and we undertake this reassessment with a particular emphasis on the teacher’s “place.” Through a review of three different modalities of teaching, we propose a transportive lens for understanding the place of the teacher in environmental communication pedagogy, which takes into account the teacher’s place within the learning environment and acknowledges their role in guiding the movement of learners through pedagogic environmental communication places and praxis.
Free full article eprint (please message me if these run out and I'm happy to share the pdf): https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GWVGQHSHYNF7WRXAZ9QC/full?target=10.1080/17524032.2023.2189081

Environmental Communication, 2023

While contemporary ecocidal cultures are premised on a human/nature binary that treats humans as ... more While contemporary ecocidal cultures are premised on a human/nature binary that treats humans as separate from, superior to, and entitled to mastery over nature, this study explores a range of commonly existing imaginaries that unravel the binary and could enable broad systems change. We introduce a deceptively simple freewrite methodology around the foundational concept “nature” to decipher such unravelings in Western/ized settings. Applying this methodology in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, we exhibit how freewrites can improvisationally reveal and engage productive tensions (dialectics) that trouble the binary, support reflexive ecologically centered becoming, and, in some cases, provide ways to eschew the binary altogether. The present study operates from the stubbornly optimistic perspective that our species’ capacity to collectively, even quickly embrace ecocentric meaning systems that trigger massive change should be widely acknowledged and actively encouraged.
A free full article can be accessed at: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SI8QBSCCRRPJZMJQEVFH/full?target=10.1080/17524032.2023.2199946. Once these run out, interested readers are encouraged to contact me for the full pdf.

Geoforum, 2021

The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend... more The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors’ reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people’s interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological “invisibility.” In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and “natural” realms spectacularly collapses.'

Journal of Media Literacy & Journal of Sustainability Education, 2020

Transformative sustainable pedagogy and public intellectual work share the same aims and guidepos... more Transformative sustainable pedagogy and public intellectual work share the same aims and guideposts, including upholding higher education’s foundational intentions of fostering moral character in tomorrow’s leaders. Radical modes of sustainable education (including regenerative pedagogy, which tends to the global shift to restore, respect, and regenerate ecological and societal balance, and inside-out pedagogy, which helps learners take their inner seeds, sprouts, and blossoms of good ecocultural intentions to stages of external fruition) speak both to educating learners and engaging the public. If pedagogues aim to encourage students to put beliefs into action and be leading voices in ethically addressing today’s pressing environment and society problems, this may require role modeling by having the courage to do so themselves. In these contexts, the author relates her own experiences speaking for Extinction Rebellion as an illustration of expanding notions of what it means to be a sustainability educator today.
Open Access: http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/blooming-in-the-doom-and-gloom-bringing-regenerative-pedagogy-to-the-rebellion_2020_04/

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020

Free open public access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2514848620901443 Abstract... more Free open public access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2514848620901443
Abstract: New radical environmental action movements are attracting large numbers of diverse actors who inevitably will take inspiration and learn from mistakes of those radical environmental organizations that precede them and continue today into middle age. The representational strategies of these established organizations are of specific interest as they enter a maturity phase that coincides with the planet experiencing an unprecedented anthropogenic moment of reckoning – a time when more broadly engaging and transformative activism is paramount to reconfiguring ecological, societal, and spatial orientations. We focus on Sea Shepherd, a global ocean protection organization founded in the same decade as many other formatively radical organizations, to examine its historic and current representations of its direct action stance; its multiple and at times conflicting positioning of cetaceans; its emphasis on celebrity and timely campaigns; and its longstanding military, war, and piracy framing – much of which has garnered attention based on appealing to news values of conventional media outlets. We illustrate ways direct action may be framed as in opposition to current extractive practices (against framing) or as a collaborative means to thriving futures (with framing) and consider ways activism frames might eschew violent clashes and celebrity long valued by conventional media outlets and speak more to today’s broader internet-savvy populations and to the reconfigurative potential of guardianship, interconnectedness, and nurturance."

Local Environment, 2019

This study explores ecocultural meaning systems and practices among villagers in Oman within the ... more This study explores ecocultural meaning systems and practices among villagers in Oman within the context of globalising neoliberal material-symbolic discourses. Our analysis illustrates ways in which villager understandings of ecological relations are rooted in traditional agricultural practices, cultural values, and spirituality. We identify themes that are fundamental to enduring traditional Omani ecoculture, including a core premise of kinship-in-place, and contrast these with recently introduced but increasingly dominating transnational capitalist premises in Oman including a premise of agriculture as a purely economic activity that is sustained by mechanisation and competitiveness. We examine the symbolic and material tensions between these contrasting ways of being.

Journal of Sustainability Education, 2018

Introduction “When I say ‘nature,’ I mean…” is the seemingly simple prompt for a pedagogical fre... more Introduction

“When I say ‘nature,’ I mean…” is the seemingly simple prompt for a pedagogical free write exercise developed by Tema Milstein (Milstein, Alhinai, Castro-Sotomayor, Griego, Hoffmann, Parks, Siebert & Thomas, 2017) to illuminate and open up for questioning and transforming our cultural assumptions, embodied meanings, and social constructions associated with the idea of “nature.” A free write is an activity that channels one’s stream of consciousness. Once given the prompt, you write without self-editing. Nonstop. No pauses to think. Keep the movement flowing. Feel it going through your fingers up to your wrist. Consciously embody your meaning, if only for a short while —the exercise lasts between three to five minutes. In Milstein’s exercise, participants then read over what they have written, looking for one term they feel answers what “nature” means to them, and they then recite that word aloud each after the other in a river of words. The exercise’s goal is to foster learning about sustainability that starts from within and moves outward. The river of words that results allows participants to identify their own ways of knowing “nature” and then to explore diverse and similar ways of thinking, feeling, and representing “nature,” including those that perpetuate dominant Western and industrial societies’ human/nature and society/nature binaries and those that represent lesser heard but ever enduring and reviving ecocentric ways of knowing.

In an open discussion that follows, learners address the nuances and power of meanings of “nature” by responding to some guiding questions, including: How difficult is it to put “nature” into words? How about one word? How do your chosen words represent our understanding and relationships with “nature”? Would it be different if instead of “nature” in this free write prompt, we used “environment,” “resource,” or “Gaia”? If, you could come up with a different word for “nature” that might relay more sustainable ways of knowing, what word would that be? The free write and the subsequent discussion encourage both awareness and examination of dominant, alternative, and counter ecocultural meanings embedded within ourselves and our societies and also create a transformative space in which to reconsider our relations within what Abram (1996) generatively terms the more-than-human world.

Inspired by and in answer to our experience with this educational exercise, we sought to explore a wide spectrum of current ecocultural relations through the creative methodology and expression of performance. We use compound terms such as “ecoculture,” “humanature,” and “humanimal,” and phrases such as “with/in/as ‘nature’” to discursively enmesh human and “nature” as they are in life (Milstein, 2012; Milstein, Anguiano, Sandoval, Chen, & Dickinson, 2011; Milstein & Dickinson, 2012). This creative scholarly discourse is itself a performance of symbolic action, an ongoing attempt at meaning-making and practice shifting. Accordingly, we reengaged the same free write as our entry point to initiate individual pieces and then interwove these into an intersubjective and responsive 35-minute group performance. Though some of us had significant experience in performance, the majority had none. Creating our performance challenged our beliefs and boundaries within and outside ourselves. In addition to stretching our comfort zones and modes of expression, the process allowed us to reflect in new ways on different environmental knowings, identities, and positionalities that continuously work in tandem, and at times in conflict, in our scholarship and personal lives. After exploring our own —as well as some oppositional— perspectives of “nature,” seeking interactions among our pieces provided generative catalysts, allowing us to develop more nuanced and multidimensional understandings of the ecocultural complexity spawned by different backgrounds, childhoods, access levels, travels, homes, humanature interactions, and the many other infinite layers that make us all multifaceted beings. In the creative process, our ways of dwelling in the world became more exposed and our understandings of humans with/in/as “nature” were challenged.

From this intimate struggle sprouted mutual recognition, albeit not without difficulty or tension. In this performance, environmental ideologies often hidden behind the veil of common sense, political posturings, or disciplined concealments emerge, intersect, and crash. Writing our pieces revealed beliefs and values we did not know we had, and the process led us to explore those ecocultural systems of meaning we cannot extricate from dominant anthropocentric ideologies as well as those we feel may illuminate contours of sustainable, restorative, and regenerative ways of knowing and being.

Below, we first present the script of our resulting performance of “When I say ‘nature.’” We then reflect on how writing and acting transformed us personally, and to what extent the performance was and continues to be essential to our ways of learning and teaching about sustainability, and of knowing and walking the Earth today and in the future. We close with insights on how movements, emotions, and multiple voices and personas coalesced in the learning process of performing environmental meanings and knowledges, and how this embodied education transformed us as Earthlings.

We first performed this piece as a peer reviewed performance at the 2015 Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) in Boulder, CO, USA, in response to the international conference’s theme that year: “Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication” (you can access the recording here). We then performed the piece outdoors for students at the University of New Mexico in spring 2016 and, with just one of us performing a solo part, in spring 2017. The script is our inquisitive wonders engaging with deeper embodied insights to heal via reconnecting in a communal spirit and fostering imaginations that emerged as radically transformative, thus insinuating the need for a more nuanced and free scholarship. Performing it attuned us with the wider world and showed us the value of art as liberating pedagogic activism.

Environmental Communication, 2019

In this unprecedented era of anthropogenic ecological destruction, this study illustrates inadequ... more In this unprecedented era of anthropogenic ecological destruction, this study illustrates inadequacies in conceptual language available in Western settings to think deeply and holistically about “nature.” At the same time, the study illustrates transformative potential of moments of ecocultural reflexivity. Using free write methodology, we examine ways participants in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia articulate what they mean when they say “nature.” We interpret participant streams of consciousness as representative of a wider Western river-way, a channel of dominant, multiple, and contradictory meanings in continuous movement. We identify conceptual obstructions that provide glimpses into ways Western ecological relations are bounded and dammed by binary, fragmented, and unconsidered meanings. Yet reflexivity in the face of such obstructions, and in potent ecocultural side streams of childhood remembering and ecocentric cosmology, provides some participants a lucid flow of regenerative narratives at a time such shared stories are urgently needed.

Antipode, 2018

As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered... more As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered Florida manatees' warm water springs winter habitat, more than half of the manatees have come to depend upon fossil fuel-burning power plant hot water effluent channels for survival. In an effort to save these manatees, environmental activists have leveraged the US Endangered Species Act to protect the effluent streams and, by extension, have enshrined the power plants themselves as ecological saviors. This study interrogates the paradoxes within the resulting spatio-legal regime. Recognizing the problematic human/nature binary at the heart of dominant Western practices, our study suggests spatial and legal regimes do not simply reify and reproduce this binary but also produce invisible ecocultural spaces that are essential to prop up an inherently unstable , illusory, and ultimately destructive definition of human existence.

Frontiers in Communication: Science and Environmental Communication, 2017

This study investigates ecocultural discourses and practices among the Gedeo in southern Ethiopia... more This study investigates ecocultural discourses and practices among the Gedeo in southern Ethiopia within the contexts of globalizing commodification of nature, successive governmental extractivist and conservationist discourses, and increasingly influential colonial present religious systems. Our analysis illustrates ways in which indigenous Gedeo understandings of reciprocal ecological coexistence are rooted in cultural knowledge, values, and customs. However, competing forms of knowledge introduced in the form of governance, commerce, conservation, and religion have resulted in an in-process shift from traditionally, spiritually maintained mutualist human–environment relations to dualist commodified relations, particularly among youth, and dualist expert-reliant conservation-ist relations emanating from governmental bodies. By examining a traditional meaning system during an explicit process of erasure, the study points to ways local meanings of, and narratives about, ecocultural interactions are produced and communicated within wider contexts of power, and illustrates tensions among traditional, governmental, capitalist, conservationist, and religious environmental ontologies in everyday and institutional practice. Within a short drive from Dilla 1 town in southern Ethiopia to its rural environs, one can vividly observe two contrasting aspects of human–environment relations. On the one hand are the Gedeo youth, engaged in cutting trees for firewood, charcoal, and construction materials, and the truck drivers, loading the resulting lumber to sell in nearby towns. On the other hand, a bit further into the hinterlands from the main road, are the elders who continue their sacred beliefs and practices of agroforestry, which protect trees from being cut down, harbor diverse aspects of the ecosystem, and sustain a long-standing coexistence. Whereas Gedeo elders are worried about the decline of indigenous knowledge and the rise of environmental degradation, the youth and government authorities interpret human–environment relations differently. The elders' worry is rooted in the shift that is poignantly illustrated in an ongoing transformation of the core Gedeo mutualist premise of " tree is life " to the increasingly predominant dualist premise, especially among Gedeo youth, of " tree is money in pocket. " In this study, we focus on environmental conservation in the contexts of agroforestry in Gedeo in southern Ethiopia and, more specifically, on hierarchically ordered forms of knowledge and 1 Dilla town, located about 360 km to the south of Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, is an administrative headquarters of the Gedeo zone in southern Ethiopia.

Environmental Communication, 2016

This study ethnographically identifies and examines a common-sense performer metaphor entangled w... more This study ethnographically identifies and examines a common-sense performer metaphor entangled within deep-rooted Western ecocultural conceptions, in which humans are perceived as separate from and audience to a spectacular nature. I illustrate the cultural cohesiveness of the performer metaphor in a Western nature tourism setting to draw attention to the term’s pervasiveness, its network of metaphoric entailments, and its generally unreflected upon meaning and reverberations. I examine struggles in using alternative metaphors and demonstrate ways the performer metaphor mediates processes of involvement with/in nature.

Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Jan 1, 2008

Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Jan 1, 2011

Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Jan 1, 2009