Kevin Michael DeLuca

Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation

This essay advocates the necessity of considering the body when attempting to understand the effects of many forms of public argument, especially social protest rhetoric. Close readings of the unru...

Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism

This essay examines the significance of landscape photography in the birth of environmentalism. In particular, this essay considers how Carleton Watkins’ 1860s photographs of Yosemite Valley created both a way of viewing the American landscape and a representational vocabulary for environmentalist claims to public preservation. In understanding these images as rhetorical, this essay offers a sustained exploration of the political and cultural effects of visual rhetoric. This exploration constitutes critical intervention in a number of discourses. Most obviously, this work is contributing to a growing literature in several disciplines that treats images as integral to politics. Additionally, this work is also adopting the cultural studies position of considering politics in its most encompassing sense and accounting for its multiple manifestations. Most importantly, in unearthing an episode in the history of the construction of pristine wilderness as the sublime object of environmentalism, this essay interrupts the mainstream environmental discourse that pays homage to the wilderness icon without paying heed to the political and cultural costs of such devotion.

The Truth of the Matter: Motherhood, Community and Environmental Justice

Armed with their personal experiences and community ties, the women of Environmental Justice have called into question the distribution of waste in the United States. In this essay, we explore the communicative practices that have enabled the movement to achieve change in extraordinarily difficult contexts. The women use what appears to be a liability, their gender, especially their role as mothers, to challenge practices and policies that threaten their homes, families, and communities.

Greenpeace International Media Analyst Reflects on Communicating Climate Change

This essay is an interview about the communication choices that the senior media analyst of one of the most significant environmental advocacy organizations in the world, Greenpeace, faces when organizing and creating publicity about global climate change. The interviewee is Greenpeace Organizer Soenke Lorenzen (1966), Hannover, Germany), who studied Geography and Cultural Anthropology at the Universität Trier (Germany), Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg (Germany), and Universität Zürich (Switzerland). He also worked as documentalist for the award winning Photography Agency Lookat in Zürich and as Senior Analyst for Cision (a global leader in providing media intelligence). The interviewer is Kevin Michael DeLuca, a professor of Communication at the University of Utah. He is author of numerous articles, as well as “Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism” (Routledge, 2005).

Trains in the Wilderness: The Corporate Roots of Environmentalism

Environmentalism has been sustained by a mythic discourse about heroic individuals discovering and saving pristine wilderness. Although a successful rhetorical strategy, this mythic discourse erases a complicated history and has significant political costs. Some contemporary wilderness activists are enacting a new wilderness vision that integrates wilderness and social concerns in a way that opens environmentalism to unexpected yet promising alliances with justice activists, unions, and corporations.

The corpus of Daniel Pearl

Acts of terrorism and their presence in mass media have long intrigued scholars throughout a wide range of academic disciplines. The kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl and the subsequent release of a videotape that made his execution public on a global scale raise substantive questions regarding the rhetorical nature of such acts and the competing nationalist discourses that make claims on the human body. This essay traces the role of Pearls body in discourses that constitute Pakistani and American nationalist identities. Through a rhetorical analysis of the execution videotape and news reports in both countries, the role of the human body as a rhetorical resource within the mediated discourse on terrorism is elucidated.

Memories of the Tropics in Industrial Jungles: Constructing Nature, Contesting Nature

This essay examines zoos as a site of struggle in the construction of meanings and memories of human–nature relations. Modern zoos are symbols of imperial power and celebrations of the domination of nature. The grafting of “tropic worlds” onto these monuments of modernity renders the meaning of zoos more ambiguous, reflecting discursive struggles over the meaning of nature, questions about the wisdom of development and progress, recognition of the need for conservation and preservation, and nostalgia for a nature that has been lost. Through a close textual reading of “The Rainforest” at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, this essay explores the simulation of nature in zoos and “tropic worlds” in North American cities. These hyperreal spaces contain an extraordinary amount of the history and politics of the culture that constructs them for fascination, edification, conservation, commodification, and salvation. At stake in these simulated natures is not only the constructions of nature as spectacle and animals as commodities, but also the use of knowledge to maintain certain forms of domination and the “writing” of industrial cultures historical memory of nature and human–nature relations.

Interrupting the World As It Is: Thinking Amidst the Corporatocracy and in the Wake of Tunisia, Egypt, and Wisconsin

We will never understand what constrains us and tries to make us despair, if we do not constantly return to the fact that ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology . . . . A solitary power, whose army single-handedly terrorizes the entire planet, dictates its law to the circulation of capital and images, and loudly announces everywhere, and with the most extreme violence, the Duties and Rights that fall to everybody else. (Badiou, 2006, p. 137)

Exploring Environmentalism amidst the Clamor of Networks: A Social Network Analysis of Utah Environmental Organizations

Dwelling in a world awash in multiple environmental crises while science and social theory erode the last vestiges of the subject of humanism, it makes sense to imagine our world beyond the lens of humanism and turn to diverse methodologies in order to explore what is going on and how to promote changes that nurture ecological sustainability. In this essay we take on this task in relation to environmental communication. In what follows we explore the contours of the age after humanism, what we term the Age of the Animate Earth. In the wake of the theoretical and actual deconstruction of the subject, we offer networks as a key unit of analysis. From this perspective, we suggest social network analysis (SNA) as one viable method for doing environmental communication studies and perform this move through a SNA of Utah environmental groups.

The Argumentative Force of Image Networks: Greenpeace's Panmediated Global Detox Campaign

This essay engages the force of images as an important form of argumentation in the contemporary mediascape, which is being constantly transformed by flows of image networks across various social media platforms. This mediascape requires tools that move beyond verbal architectures, inspiring new concepts and practices of analysis. In response, this essay proposes concepts for engaging the argumentative force of the rush of images transforming the world, including panmediated networks, wild public screens, affective winds, and image events. An analysis of Greenpeaces global Detox campaign elaborates on the uses of these concepts.