Elizabeth Dickinson

Communicating a “New” Environmental Vernacular: A Sense of Relations-in-Place

This study focuses on communication as a lens and tool for reinvigorating and empowering marginalized cultural environmental relations. We use a community-based cultural approach to identify a core Hispanic premise of a sense of relations-in-place. This premise constitutes nature as a socially integrated space that provides the grounding for human relations, and differs from dominant Western discourses that constitute nature as an entity separate from humans. The studys interpretation of a more integrated orientation to environment has the potential to inform wider alternative ecocultural discourses and applications that are more inclusive, and perhaps more sustainable.

Displaced in Nature: The Cultural Production of (Non-)Place in Place-Based Forest Conservation Pedagogy

This study examines spatial practices in a forest conservation education program that incorporates place as a tool to teach environmental and forestry issues to schoolchildren and connect them with nature. By analyzing educational forests, “talking-tree trails,” classes taught to children, and how visitors move throughout the sites, this paper argues that people and practices within the forests employ a rhetoric of spatial and temporal transience that can enable a displaced experience. Human-nature dualistic tendencies that foster environmental alienation are produced culturally and spatially and are experienced in ways that can promote disconnectedness. Instead of re-placing students with nature, as place-based environmental education promotes, forestry and pedagogical systems can practice nature as non-placed.

Kiva.org, Person-to-Person Lending, and the Conditions of Intercultural Contact

Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.orgs microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.

Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

Abstract While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor peoples disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.orgs lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.

Empowering Disgust: Redefining Alternative Postpartum Placenta Practices

ABSTRACT This article examines communication practices surrounding the unconventional yet emerging trend of postpartum placenta use: eating, encapsulating, or burying the human placenta. Through interviews with both supporters and nonsupporters of postpartum placenta practices, we explore conceptualizations of placenta consumption and burial within larger mothering, childbirth, and postpartum rhetorics. We argue that placenta practices function rhetorically within a core frame of disgust, which both supporters and nonsupporters initially use to respond to placenta use. Yet supporters rearticulate the literal meaning of disgust to create an empowering rhetorical frame from which to view placenta practices and motherhood. In effect, supporters reframe the meaning of disgust toward the mainstream Western medicalization of birth in order to position placenta practices, natural childbirth, and mothering as empowering.

Ecocultural Conversations: Bridging the Human-Nature Divide through Connective Communication Practices

ABSTRACT Scholars have long argued that various modern, Western cultures have come to conceptualize “the environment” as a separate, ordered, and submissive entity. A problematic human–nature divide stems from this rational view, resulting in environmental degradation. Yet, humans and other-than-humans regularly interrupt these ordered, rational framings. Through a qualitative examination of a K–12 state forest conservation education program, I use a transhuman, materialist communication approach to illustrate how curriculum and the forest service problematically construct humanature relations. I then show how students, rangers, and other-than-humans disrupt and disorder these framings. Instead of using practices that worsen the problem, practitioners and researchers can create ecocultural conversations—connective communication practices that help bridge the human–nature divide. This article articulates how more sustainable environmental communication theories and practices can address dire social and environmental problems.

The Placenta Economy: From trashed to treasured bio-products

This article examines the human placenta not only as a scientific, medical and biological entity but as a consumer bio-product. In the emergent placenta economy, the human placenta is exchanged and gains potentiality as food, medicine and cosmetics. Drawing on empirical research from the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Japan, the authors use feminist cultural analysis and consumer theories to discuss how the placenta is exchanged and gains commodity status as a medical supplement, smoothie, pill and anti-ageing lotion. Placenta preparers and new mothers cite medical properties and spirituality as reasons for eating or encapsulating the placenta, reinstating ideas of the liberated good mother. Meanwhile, the cosmetics industry situates the placenta as an extract and hence a commodity, re-naturalizing it as an anti-ageing, rejuvenating and whitening bio-product. The authors conclude that, in the emergent bio-economy, the dichotomy between the inner and the outer body is deconstructed, while the placenta gains clinical and industrial as well as affective value.

(Re)appropriating The Petroglyphs: Commercial representations of a cultural landscape

This article examines the case of the Albuquerque Petroglyphs to explore how government and business commercially appropriate and reappropriate cultural landscapes for use in capitalistic development. The Petroglyph National Monument was established in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to protect an area and rock carvings from looting and development. Stakeholders evoked Pueblo and Spanish sacredness in their protection arguments to establish the monument. When governmental officials then controversially moved protected rock carvings to build a commuter road through the monument to access development, the rights of developers and consumers were privileged over Pueblo and environmental groups. Developers then drew from governmental framings and evoked a heightened Spanish colonial and commercial heritage to market nearby homes to consumers. This article argues that protection discourses can contribute to, rather than restrict, subsequent commercial development.