Research

Common threads throughout all of my research are public understanding of science, the human/nature dichotomy, and the interrogation of how neoliberal discourses of progress and expansion exploit science, degrade the environment, and impact human, non-human, and ecosystem health.

My primary research focus proceeds from the assumption that public discourse is a key site of struggle in efforts to shape human relationships with the more-than-human world and influence environmental attitudes, policies and actions. Adequately addressing contemporary crises like climate change, wildfires, ocean ecosystems, and risks to public health requires communication and collaboration between scientists, policy-makers, and the public. This collaboration (or lack thereof) has extreme impacts on democracy, global governance, and both ecological and social justice. To address these questions, I have engaged in a research agenda that employs critical theory, textual analysis methods, theories of science, technology, and society (STS), environmental humanities, and organizational communication studies. Here, I trace the two threads of critical textual analysis and organizational communication to demonstrate my research progress.

Critical Textual Analysis

From a critical textual analysis lens, I seek to understand how both decision makers and ordinary citizens struggle for control over public discourse—or, words, images, artwork, metaphors, and social narratives used to understand the environment, define human relationships with the Earth, and negotiate individual and societal decisions about environmental, science, and/or health issues.

• Much of my research emphasis in this area comes from my (completed) dissertation and ongoing project, Articulating Geoengineering as Good Science: Urgency, Optimism, And Ideology in The Anthropocene, which analyzes the ongoing research and policies surrounding the experimental technology of climate engineering. This case study examines boundary-crossing discourses among scientists and policy-makers that influence scientific regulation and decision making regarding environmental policy and climate change. The project serves to advance science and environmental communication by offering further understanding of how scientists and policy circles conceptualize what counts as “good science”—or science that is both methodologically credible and situated in a social context. So far, a portion of this project was published in Science Communication in June 2020.

• In a semi-related project, I took the leadership role in co-authoring an article that suggests the limitations to environmental communication, climate action, and future climate policy due to human/nature separation among social and material networks. We suggest the possibilities of pairing actor-network theory (ANT) and articulation theory together into a concept we call “actant articulation.” Actant articulation incorporates the political force of articulation theory while still addressing the material relationships that shape our world in the structure of ANT. Meanwhile, pulling ANT into articulation addresses a necessary vocabulary for bringing articulation theory around the “material turn.” In our synthesis, we use the devastating global wildfires of 2019 as a case study to demonstrate how the various material parts and pieces that make up the world around us have their own “voice.” Actant articulation considers how the non-human shapes society through communication with humans, regardless of our ability to process it. This piece is currently under review with Environmental Communication.

• In turning from texts to images and artwork, I am currently leading two collaborative projects that analyze visual portrayals of science, Earth, and the environment. The first, funded by a $3,300 National Geographic Early Career Grant, examines how artwork created from ocean plastics functions as a form of communication, specifically focusing on how visitors interact with artwork that is designed to impart messages about human impacts on the environment. This is a multi-part qualitative project, focusing on several aspects: an examination of representations and re-mediations of wildlife and human pollution through ocean plastics sculptural displays by the nonprofit organization Washed Ashore; analysis of interviews about how artists explain their work in the themes of environmentalism and the relationships between science and art; and an exploration of audience reception to the art-as-pedagogy as we examine the reactions and connections made by audiences at these art exhibits. The first article in this series, Art-as-Pedagogy for Environmental Activism: The Rhetoric of Washed Ashore’s Ocean Plastics Exhibition was granted the Outstanding Paper Award at the IECA’s 2021 Conference on Communication and the Environment.

• The second project, written with members of our cross-institutional Chemical Rhetoric research lab, responds to calls from rhetoricians of science to theorize the emergence and circulation of public vocabularies of chemistry. We employ close-reading techniques to analyze a series of illustrated, long-form Union Carbide advertisements published in popular magazines from 1950-1963. Interrogating how this campaign created both visual and textual narrative formations of science, chemistry, and nature, the analysis demonstrates how the campaign fostered a strategy of chemical rhetoric that fused science with ideologies of religion and environmental domination through technical and synthetic means. Like the aforementioned pieces, this article ultimately interrogates long-held social narratives that shape how we (in wealthy Western nations) understand and interact with the Earth. This article was presented to the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the National Communication Association convention in November, 2022.

Organizational Communication

From an organizational communication lens, my work explores actors, communicative networks, and cultures that inform our understanding of how to use systems to improve upon structural problems. Whether I am studying professional identity among pediatric residents or the emergence of new science and technology, I am exploring the role of rhetoric and discourse in organizational processes related to four thematic areas: the construction of professionalization, knowledge formation, expertise & legitimation, and boundary formation & maintenance.

• Some of my work in this area focused on organizational communication strategies and occupational identity among pediatric residents regarding hand-off and the tools that aid communication during shift transitions. Published in Journal of Applied Communication and Health Communication, this two-part series responded to tensions between participant autonomy and organizational control, as we explored shifts in organizational culture and training that are necessary to optimize the environment in which residents follow organizational rules for safer, structured hand-off. Ultimately, this project answers: how can we use communication to change the ways that communities interact with individual subjects and mediating resources? How can reassessments of how we use and think about resources help to counterbalance structural tensions on a systemic level? These questions have the ability not only to offer opportunities for applied research within organizational settings, but they also speak to broader conversations about the narratives that shape our society.

• Additionally, in a recently completed piece with the Chemical Rhetoric research lab, I led a project analyzing Dow Chemical’s “Know More in ‘74” campaign (Kmi74). This internal affirmative action campaign detailed Dow’s affirmative action efforts to recruit women workers in the 1970s. The data collection for this project was funded with a travel grant from the Othmer Library of Chemical History. Our analysis of the campaign found that though KMi74 was started to legitimize women workers at Dow Chemical, the campaign delegitimized women’s work via appeals to benevolent sexism and constructed professionalization. Given the government's public recognition of KMi74 as legislatively compliant, we suggested that these appeals functioned historically as organizational scripts for inclusion initiatives in the years that followed, scripts that upheld (and continue to uphold) the law but not the changes in practice necessary for the achievement of meaningful organizational opportunity and equity. This article was recently published in Management Communication Quarterly.

• Finally, in an (upcoming) book chapter in Communication and Catastrophic Events: Strategic Risk and Crisis Management, my co-author and I identify challenges to collaboration among scientists and other stakeholders, including crisis communicators, policymakers, and the public. We argue that due to increasing environmental and public health disasters, there will be a pressing need for interorganizational collaboration among scientists and risk and crisis managers in the coming decades, and we propose that organizational communication theories can enhance understanding of these collaborations. Using a case study of a local crisis collaboration working during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 wildland fire season, we find that cascading and simultaneous disasters will require flexible crisis response plans, greater relationship-building among scientists, public health practitioners, and risk and crisis practitioners, and that public information sharing will be essential.