Rethinking rhetorical field methods on a precarious planet

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a narrative of rhetorical field methods and intertwined climate justice exigencies. We argue the emergence of and resistance toward rhetorical field methods responds to a growing ecological consciousness, reflecting a changing understanding of the relationship between human agency and the planet. Drawing upon fieldwork from our own research and other scholars in the field, we organize our argument in three related themes: culture, interconnection, and voice. Given the expansive objects, people, and practices rhetorical field methods engage, this approach offers one compelling way to listen to and amplify marginalized voices. Overall, this essay explores how rhetorical field methods have provided and might further offer a compelling set of principles and practices for resisting structures of ecological and social precarity for life on Earth.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate justice
• culture
• environment
• rhetorical field methods
• voice

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the communities with whom we have worked over the years as part of our fieldwork and advocacy, as well as the two anonymous reviewers and the Editor, Prof. Afifi.

ORCID

Phaedra C. Pezzullo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5766-7776

Catalina M. de Onís http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4281-1739

Notes

1. We argue environmental justice studies and ethnography share common values, making field methods an appropriate research approach (de Onís & Pezzullo, in press).

2. This ethical duty guiding environmental communication resonates with Madison’s (2012, p. 5) definition of “critical ethnography” as a practice that “begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain.”

3. Tsing (2005) reinforces the significance of ethnography for addressing the cultural frictions of environmental destruction that are uneven, unstable, and significant.

4. Relatedly, rhetoricians focused on science communication have emphasized how ecology and rhetoric overlap in research assumptions and may be mutually beneficial for interdisciplinary research teams. Druschke and McGreavy (2016), for example, argue rhetoric and ecology engage multiple scales over time and seek better understanding of interactions, energy, and information (p. 51).

5. Some notable monographs that draw on rhetorical field methods include but are not limited to: Asen (2015); Bennett (2009), Brooks (2014), Chávez (2013), Cintrón (1997), Pezzullo (2007), Rai (2015), Wanzer-Serrano (2015), and West (2014).

6. Rather than romanticize “critical distance” as a criterion of integrity for academic research, Conquergood (1985, p. 9) invites critical ethnographic scholars to engage in genuine conversation through a “dialogical performance.”

7. There are two ways Middleton and his collaborators have differed with Pezzullo on this point, though we all appear to have more in common than in disagreement. First, although they generously cite Pezzullo's scholarship thoroughly as influential on their arguments, Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres (2011) argue Pezzullo (2003a) does not mention her own body sufficiently in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. We caution here that, no matter the intersectional identities of the author, consistently making the author(s) the center of attention in analysis may run counter to the work of listening to marginalized and/or emergent voices. We, therefore, continue to feel it is important to underscore the significance of self-reflexivity in co-produced knowledge, while recognizing that no study is exhaustive. Second, in Toxic Tourism, Pezzullo (2007) analyzes a tour in person and a tour on film (produced from the tour she participated in as well as others). The goal was not to fetishize face-to-face interactions but to consider methodological affordances. Middleton et al. (2015) “argue that the information made available when bodies are present as rhetoric unfolds around (and with) them is qualitatively different from that shared through texts and mediation.” Pezzullo (2003a, 2007) argues rhetorical field methods can gain us access to information and insight otherwise unattainable; nevertheless, she continues to find evidence that media, such as documentary films, may also disseminate information not previously known to an audience and to goad that audience to feel a sense of presence from otherwise alienated patterns of interconnection. Consider, for example, the successful advocacy campaign related to Blackfish (Cowperthwaite, 2013).

8. Oral history involves “a recounting of a social historical moment reflected in the life or lives of individuals who remember them and/or experienced them” (Madison, 2012, p. 28). Madison’s (2010) critical ethnographic practices have included Water Rites, a multimedia performance based on critical ethnographic research in Ghana about water as a human right.