Dr. Elizabeth Dickinson

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.

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.

Environmental racism typically describes how people of color are excessively affected by environmental damage and racially driven environmental policies and practices. Those wielding power can, intentionally or unintentionally, promote public and private environmental initiatives that negatively impact some people and communities over others. Effects include health-related disparities resulting from increased exposure to contaminants and pollution, spatializing practices, and political alienation. As a broad and diverse activist movement that inserts social justice into traditional environmentalism, environmental justice exposes and eliminates harmful and discriminatory environmental practices, shifts the burden of proof, and holds offenders accountable.

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.

This study situates environmental discourses and practices within a dialectical framework, identifying how contradictory, double-bindmessages can promote “schizophrenic” environmental meaning systems. I position this study through a qualitative examination of a U.S. state forest conservation education program, where K-12 students take field trips to forests to learn about nature. Adults frame environmental issues within a core stay away-get close double bind, sending conflicting messages to protect and appreciate trees, yet ultimately cut them down for human hyperconsumption. These tug-and-pull, double-bind messages enable what I call ecocultural schizophrenia, a condition that ultimately decreases connectivity and sustainability. Through alternative practices, dialectical thinking is needed to help reject ecocultural double binds and create more sustainable possibilities.

This study examines and critiques “nature-deficit disorder” (NDD), Richard Louv’s popular theory of how and why children are alienated from nature. Specifically, I explore NDD within the context of one forest conservation education program that aligns with and operationalizes Louv’s message. Underlying Louv’s and forest educators’ discourses are culturally specific assumptions about humanature relationships. Both evoke a fall-recovery narrative—that children are separated from nature and must return—and promote science and naming to reconnect. I argue that, in the absence of deeper cultural examination and alternative practices, NDD is a misdiagnosis—a problematic contemporary environmental discourse that can obscure and mistreat the problem. I call on adults to rethink humanature disconnectedness by returning to the psyche, digging deeper to the problem’s cultural roots, and using nontraditional communication practices such as emotional expression and non-naming.

This study uses communication, critical race theory (CRT), and storytelling to examine environmental racism and environmental justice efforts. In New Mexico’s Petroglyph National Monument, a conflict emerged when officials moved protected rock carvings to build a road through the park. When creating the monument, stakeholders evoked cultural and environmental protectionism. Yet, proroad campaigners then used colorblind racist development arguments, while environmental justice activists argued that the road violated Indigenous peoples’ wishes and environmental integrity. After analyzing the case, in the
tradition of CRT scholarship, I present my own fictional narrative as an environmental justice tool. I advance an environmental justice narrative framework to address environmental
racism by exploring through storytelling how racial and environmental inequalities materialize and to what effect.

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 paper 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.org’s microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, notably that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.

This study complicates the gendering of ‘‘mother nature,’’ pointing to an underlying everyday discursive formation of nature that is decidedly androcentric.The dialectic at play, a
favorably forefronted gynocentric pole masking a dominant androcentric pole, problematizes past understandings of binaries and offers new ways to understand humanature. Building
upon the burgeoning study of critical ecocultural dialectics, we empirically investigate nature framings in North American ocean and forest contexts. We suggest that a gynocentric greenwashing exists in discourses about ‘‘the environment,’’ in which communal, embodied human orientations with nature are favorably forefronted, but individuating, frontal orientations are overwhelmingly practiced.As such, everyday ecologically exultant discourses may obscure deeply embedded exploitive orientations that centrally regulate our perceptions of, and interactions with, nature.

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.

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.

This study examines how highly polarized issues can be interrupted and renegotiated through a rhetorical device that we call dialectical innovation. We analyze three popular texts—a South Parkepisode called Imaginationland, an Oprah Winfrey Show segment on freeganism, and a blog and book titled Stuff White People Like—to explore the commonly polarized topics of terrorism, the environment, and race. Drawing from the theory of dialectical disorientation, we illustrate how these artifacts uniquely interrogate polarized perspectives and open up a rhetorical space for audience members as individual agents to pursue their own generative possibilities. Facilitating this process is a rhetor within the texts who unsettles polarization and encourages generative rhetorical responses.