Tema Milstein

When Whales “Speak for Themselves”: Communication as a Mediating force in Wildlife Tourism

The case study for this ethnographic investigation is communication within the highest concentration of whale watch operations in the world, located in transnational waters of the North Pacific. The author explores this Western cultural setting in an effort to expand upon the culturally and environmentally inclusive conceptual framework of communication as a mediating force of human–nature relations. The author finds that a range of study participants view communication as human–nature transactional. The interpretations point to ways in which Westerners in a wildlife tourism setting may value silence as communicative of a co-expressive existence with nature, may be frustrated by the limitations of culturally particular tools of language for conveying knowledge of or experiences with nature, may credit nature with “speaking” in ways that serve specific functions and may be used to justify tourism endeavors, and may position particular wildlife as icons that illuminate problematic human–nature relations or that isolate such wildlife from wider eco-cultural relationships.

Nature Identification: The Power of Pointing and Naming

Pointing and naming is a basic practice of using communication to discern nature. This study illustrates connections between this symbolic action and ecocultural relations. I focus on a transnational site of wildlife tourism to explore ways nature identification has historically mediated perceptual, behavioral, and political transformations. I also examine contemporary practice, illustrating ways identification uses and meanings delineate endangered whales as unique, complex, intrinsically valued subjects, as well as generate humanature connections and protections. In discussing restorative implications and limitations for endangered species, I suggest dialectically integrating an ecological lens with the powerful individualizing discourse of nature identification.

“Somethin’ Tells Me It's All Happening at the Zoo”: Discourse, Power, and Conservationism1

This study examines how certain Western institutional discourses reproduce particular human relationships with nature. The analysis focuses upon the institutional setting of the zoo, examining long-standing multi-voiced debates about zoos and exploring the contemporary zoos conservation discourses and cultural, lexical, and spatial elements of gaze and power. The author contextualizes zoo discourses within Western ideological environmental dialectics, including those of Mastery–Harmony, Othering–Connection, and Exploitation–Idealism. The author relates these discussions to her empirical observations of how certain discursive themes are reproduced and complicated within a leading American zoo. In the tradition of critical research that advocates for social change, the essay concludes with analysis-driven discussion about possibilities for zoos to transform their core configurations to more progressively work as agents for systemic cultural and environmental change.

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.

Transcorporeal Tourism: Whales, Fetuses, and the Rupturing and Reinscribing of Cultural Constraints

We focus on the expressive performative eruptions that often mark interactive and embodied humanature events, on the discourses that surround and entangle them, and on ways such extra-discursive communicative moments might point us to new understandings about the intersections of nature, culture, and the body. Using the frameworks of tourist as spectactor, notions of transcorporeality and intersubjectivity, and environmental communication concepts about material-symbolic mediation of humanature relations, we explore how whale tourism and elective ultrasounds at times appear to rupture Western human–nature binaries and notions of contained human bodies, yet also provide surveilled and disciplined moments in which particular cultural constraints are reinscribed. We envision ways such rapturous-rupturous experiences can help inform a transcorporeal environmental ethic centered on vulnerability and openness, arguing such moments must be paired with embodied, constitutive, and structural recontextualization to allow for ecocultural transformation.

Challenges and Benefits of Community-Based Participatory Research for Environmental Justice: A Case of Collaboratively Examining Ecocultural Struggles

This essay features critical reflections on a process of generative community-based participatory research (CBPR) in which communication researchers collaborated with environmental organizations, cultural advocacy groups, and community participants to identify better ways of addressing ecocultural struggles. In response to Depoes call to promote scholar–practitioner interactions, the authors make explicit challenges and benefits implicated in employing a CBPR process to promote environmental justice. This critical reflective analysis centers on three key issues related to engaging in CBPR-oriented praxis-based research. The findings challenge the researchers role as the initiator of a community-university collaborative project, broaden the notion of community in CBPR, and promote multiple analytical perspectives that can speak to diverse partner-stakeholders. The authors conclude with a conceptualization of how CBPR can aid in promoting environmental justice as both a goal and a process and offer practical recommendations.

The Performer Metaphor: “Mother Nature Never Gives Us the Same Show Twice”

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 terms 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.

Connecting Community Voices: Using a Latino/a Critical Race Theory Lens on Environmental Justice Advocacy

Abstract This study examines the contested space of environmental inequity and demonstrates how engaged intercultural communication research can be used to put forth seldom heard cultural environmental meaning systems. In an attempt to bridge ecojustice–environmentalist divides, we use Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) to understand and promote practices of Hispanic communities enacting environmental justice and cultural activism. We also exemplify the value of an explicit focus on the role of race in environmental issues for communication scholarship.

“Tree Is Life”: The Rising of Dualism and the Declining of Mutualism among the Gedeo of Southern Ethiopia

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 conservationist 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.

Dams and Flows: Immersing in Western Meaning Systems in Search of Ecocultural Reflexivity

ABSTRACT 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.