Joshua Trey Barnett

Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis

We review energy communication, an emerging subfield of communication studies that examines the role of energy in society, and argue that it is dominated by a crisis frame. Whereas this frame can be productive, it can also be limiting. In response, we propose three areas for future energy communication research—internal rhetoric of science, comparative studies, and energy in everyday life—as starting points for rethinking and expanding energy communication. This expanded focus will continue to contribute to communication theory, add to interdisciplinary energy studies, and supply practical resources for the creation and deployment of just and sustainable energy futures.

Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice Movement

This essay conceptualizes “toxic portraits,” close-up, in situ photographs of people in toxically assaulted places. Toxic portraits articulate the multiple invisibilities attending environmental injustice through a series of visible indexical signs. As a result, toxic portraits enable spectators to see the precariousness of life as dramatized in human relationships to the environments in which we live. Drawing on the “subjunctive voice of the visual” as a rhetorical heuristic, I conceptualize the productive space created by toxic portraits and ultimately argue that these images invite an ethically inflected response to the dangers of living in a polluted world.

Energy Communication: Theory and Praxis Towards a Sustainable Energy Future

ABSTRACT This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that shares with environmental communication the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. We then offer three generative directions for future research related to energy transitions as communicative processes: analysing campaigns’ strategic efforts, critically theorizing energy’s transnational power dynamics, and theorizing the energy democracy movement.

Politics of edibility: reconceptualizing ecological relationality

ABSTRACT Taking the Infinity Burial Project (IBP) as its inspiration, this essay theorizes a politics of edibility by way of decomposing the discursive boundaries erected between human bodies and environments. In particular, this essay reads the IBP as a deconstruction of another dualism—eater/eaten—that permeates and informs cultural practices from birth to burial. Mobilizing a rhetoric of carnality, the IBP decomposes the human bodys relation to its environments, merging its statuses as eater and eaten. At the same time, this rhetoric of carnality also emphasizes the irreducibly productive nature of consumption as an articulatory practice in its own right. As this essay argues, a politics of edibility not only recognizes the superficiality of the body/environment and eater/eaten dichotomies but it also respects the relations generated in the wake of their deconstruction.

Covert Operation Archiving the Experiences of Transgender Service Members in the US Military

In this essay, the authors pose and respond to three questions about their process of generating and contributing to an archive of transgender military experiences: First, why create an archive of transgender military experiences? Second, what constitutes such an archive? And, third, what are the political stakes of doing this work? By tracing their experiences, the authors offer insights, chart challenges, and lay bare their hopes for an archive of transgendermilitary experiences. Along the way, the authors reflect on the political, legal, and ethical dimensions of this project as a way to demonstrate its broader theoretical and practical implications for the field of transgender studies.

The Ecological Awareness of an Anthropocene Philosopher

Ecological awareness is going to feel weird in the Anthropocene. Consider how thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch troubles your sense of scale and responsibility. Floating in the Pacific...

Thinking ecologically with Judith Butler

ABSTRACT This essay traces several productive points of overlap and departure between the recent philosophical work of Judith Butler and ecological thinking. While ecological philosophers and theorists have often dismissed Butlers treatment of politics and ethics as narrowly anthropocentric, this essay charges that there are considerable conceptual resources within Butlers oeuvre that are not only in accord with much recent ecological theorising but which also stand to enrich our approaches to ecological thinking and politics. Focusing specifically on three conceptual clusters – exposure and precarity; infrastructure and coexistence; and assemblies and assemblages – this essay demonstrates how Butlers work can be leveraged to augment the ways we approach both ecosystems and our more-than-human cohabitants as elements of and actors within the dynamic play of forces that make coexistence more or less possible.

Linguistic Stereotyping in Older Adults’ Perceptions of Health Care Aides

ABSTRACT The cultural and linguistic diversity of the U.S. health care provider workforce is expanding. Diversity among health care personnel such as paraprofessional health care assistants (HCAs)—many of whom are immigrants–means that intimate, high-stakes cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contact characterizes many health interactions. In particular, nonmainstream HCAs may face negative patient expectations because of patients’ language stereotypes. In other contexts, reverse linguistic stereotyping has been shown to result in negative speaker evaluations and even reduced listening comprehension quite independently of the actual language performance of the speaker. The present study extends the language and attitude paradigm to older adults’ perceptions of HCAs. Listeners heard the identical speaker of Standard American English as they watched interactions between an HCA and an older patient. Ethnolinguistic identities—either an Anglo native speaker of English or a Mexican nonnative speaker–were ascribed to HCAs by means of fabricated personnel files. Dependent variables included measures of perceived HCA language proficiency, personal characteristics, and professional competence, as well as listeners’ comprehension of a health message delivered by the putative HCA. For most of these outcomes, moderate effect sizes were found such that the HCA with an ascribed Anglo identity—relative to the Mexican guise—was judged more proficient in English, socially superior, interpersonally more attractive, more dynamic, and a more satisfactory home health aide. No difference in listening comprehension emerged, but the Anglo guise tended to engender a more compliant listening mind set. Results of this study can inform both provider-directed and patient-directed efforts to improve health care services for members of all linguistic and cultural groups.