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ABSTRACT
Intercultural communication and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have formed a fruitful partnership over the last decade. However, both stand at a juncture with exciting possibilities and imperatives for growth as the fields reflect on their overwhelming emphasis on deconstructive critiques and largely anthropocentric inquiry. In a recent work, S. Lily Mendoza and I argued that (critical) intercultural communication must go beyond its exclusive attention to anthropocentric concerns and begin to approach identity, culture, and intercultural communication from an ecologically grounded perspective. One part of this move is the need for examining culture, communication, and interculturality with critical eyes on the ways anthropocentrism shapes and organizes them, and another part is engaging and exploring alternatives. Building on this argument, this essay will discuss the potential of CDA in playing an integral role in the ecological turn in the study of intercultural communication. With rapidly deteriorating ecological health as an urgent context, CDA has already begun to take an ecological turn as marked by the articulation of ecolingustics as CDA. This essay presents a discussion of ecolingustics as a promising lens through which to examine intercultural communication.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive and thoughtful comments.
Notes
1 Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 271–84.
2 S. Lily Mendoza and Etsuko Kinefuchi, “Two Stories, One Vision: A Plea for an Ecological Turn in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 4 (2016): 275–94. See also Jürgen Werner Kremer and R. Jackson-Paton, Ethnoautobiography: Stories and Practices for Unlearning Whiteness, Decolonization, Uncovering Ethnicities (Sebastopol, CA: ReVision Publishing, 2014).
3 Rona Tamiko Halualani and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Critical Intercultural Communication Studies: At a Crossroads,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 3.
4 Rona Tamiko Halualani, S. Lily Mendoza, and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “‘Critical’ Junctures in Intercultural Communication Studies: A Review,” Review of Communication 9, no. 1 (2009): 19–32.
5 Ibid., 32.
6 Mendoza and Kinefuchi, “Two Stories, One Vision,” 276.
7 Ibid., 277.
8 Union of Concerned Scientists, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists, 1997), https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/11/World%20Scientists%27%20Warning%20to%20Humanity%201992.pdf.
9 William J. Ripple et al., “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” BioScience 67, no. 12 (2017): 1026–28.
10 Robert Cox, “Nature's ‘Crisis Disciplines’: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?” Environmental Communication 1, no. 1 (2007): 5–20.
11 Ibid., 6.
12 Ben A. Minteer, “Anthropocentrism,” in Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman (Farmington Hills, MI: Cengage Learning, 2009), 58–62.
13 For thoughtful discussions about the exigency of ecological literacy as a pedagogical imperative, see Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006); David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004).
14 Halualani and Nakayama, “Critical Intercultural Communication Studies,” 5.
15 See Donal Carbaugh, “Naturalizing Communication and Culture,” in The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, ed. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 38–57; “Quoting ‘the Environment’: Touchstones on Earth,” Environmental Communication 1, no. 1 (2007): 64–73.
16 See Tema Milstein, “Nature Identification: The Power of Pointing and Naming,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 1 (2011): 3–24; Tema Mistein and Elizabeth Dickinson, “Gynocentric Greenwashing: The Discursive Gendering of Nature,” Communication, Culture & Critique 5, no. 4 (2012): 510–32; Elizabeth Dickerson, “Ecocultural Conversations: Bridging the Human–Nature Divide through Connective Communication Practices,” Southern Communication Journal 81, no. 1 (2016): 32–48.
17 Minteer, “Anthropocentrism,” 59; Allen Thompson, “Anthropocentrism: Humanity as Peril and Promise,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, ed. Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 77–90.
18 See Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (Devon: Green Books, 2003); Gregory Bateson, Steps to An Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1972).
19 Teun A. van Dijk, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Debrah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 352.
20 James R. Martin, “Positive Discourse Analysis: Power, Solidarity and Change,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 49 (2004): 179–202. See also Felicitas Macgilchrist, “Positive Discourse Analysis: Contesting Dominant Discourses by Reframing the Issues,” Critical Approaches to Discourse Across the Disciplines 1, no. 1 (2007): 74–94; Rebecca Rogers and Melissa Mosley Wetzel, “Studying Agency in Literacy Teacher Education: A Layered Approach to Positive Discourse Analysis,” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 10, no. 1 (2013): 62–92; Óscar García Agustín, “Enhancing Solidarity: Discourse of Voluntary Organizations on Immigration and Integration in Multicultural Societies,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7, no. 1 (2012): 81–97; Tom Bartlett, Hybrid Voices and Collaborative Change: Contextualising Positive Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 2012).
21 Martin, “Positive Discourse Analysis,” 180–82.
22 Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcom Coultard, eds., “Preface,” in Text and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996), xi–xii; Gunther Kress, “Representational Resources and the Production of Subjectivity: Questions for the Theoretical Development of Critical Discourse Analysis in a Multicultural Society,” in Text and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcom Coultard (London: Routledge, 1996), 15–16.
23 Martin, “Positive Discourse Analysis,” 184.
24 Martin, “Positive Discourse Analysis.”
25 From Martin's description, it is clear the word is used in the same spirit as, for example, “positive organizational communication,” which focuses on discursive and social constructions of meaning that are affirmative, generative, and enriching in organizational contexts. However, describing PDA as an approach that works with agreeable discourses rather than disagreeable ones (as framed, for example, by Felicitas Macgilchrist) may construe the approach as indeed naïve in constructing discourse as a homogeneous site of social process devoid of contradiction. See Macgilchrist, “Positive Discourse Analysis.” Ruth Wodak points out in her conversation with Gavin Kendall that “critical” does not mean “negative,” but that it is about “not taking anything for granted, opening up alternative readings (justifiable through cues in the texts); self-reflection of the research process; making ideological positions manifested in the respective text transparent, etc.” See Gavin Kendall, “What Is Critical Discourse Analysis? Ruth Wodak in Conversation with Gavin Kendall,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8, no. 2, art. 29 (2007): para. 32, http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/255/561.
26 Fairclough and Wodak, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” 259.
27 Teun A. van Dijk, From Text Grammar to Critical Discourse Analysis: A Brief Academic Autobiography (n.p.: published by author, 2004), 26, http://www.discourses.org/OldArticles/From%20text%20grammar%20to%20critical%20discourse%20analysis.pdf.
28 See Anabela Carvalho, “Representing the Politics of the Greenhouse Effect: Discursive Strategies in the British Media,” Critical Discourse Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–29; Tina Sikka, “A Critical Discourse Analysis of Geoengineering Advocacy,” Critical Discourse Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 163–75; Bonnie McElhinny, “Written in Sand: Language and Landscape in an Environmental Dispute in Southern Ontario,” Critical Discourses Studies 3, no. 2 (2006): 123–52; Joshua C. Gellers, “Greening Critical Discourse Analysis: Applications to the Study of Environmental Law,” Critical Discourse Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 483–93; Richard J. Alexander, Framing Discourse on the Environment: A Critical Discourse Approach (London: Routledge, 2009).
29 Aaran Stibbe, “An Ecolinguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies,” Critical Discourse Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 117–28.
30 Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By (London: Routledge, 2015), 1.
31 Stibbe, “An Ecolinguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies,” 118–19.
32 Norman Fairclough, “Critical Discourse Analysis as a Method in Social Scientific Research,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 121–38.
33 Stibbe, “An Ecolinguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies,” 118.
34 Amy Dalrymple, “Pipeline Route Plan First Called for Crossing North of Bismarck, Bismark Tribune, August 18, 2016, http://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/pipeline-route-plan-first-called-for-crossing-north-of-bismarck/article_64d053e4-8a1a-5198-a1dd-498d386c933c.html, accessed May 2, 2017.
35 Stibbe, Ecolingustics, 34.
36 Gellers, “Greening Critical Discourse Analysis,” 489.
37 Stibbe, Ecolingustics, 145–60; David Machin and Andrea Mayr, How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).
38 Dakota Access Pipeline Facts, https://daplpipelinefacts.com/, accessed September 12, 2017.
39 Ibid. According to the Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, every year there are 250–350 “significant” incidents involving gas pipelines. See United States Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, “Pipeline Incident 20 Year Trend,” https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/pipeline/library/data-stats/pipelineincidenttrends, accessed May 4, 2015.
40 Dakota Access Pipeline Facts.
41 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, www.standingrock.org; Stand with Standing Rock, standwithstandingrock.net.
42 “History,” Stand with Standing Rock, http://standwithstandingrock.net/history/, accessed September 12, 2017.
43 Stand with Standing Rock.
44 “Mni Wiconi—Water Is Life,” Stand with Standing Rock, http://standwithstandingrock.net/mni-wiconi/, accessed May 12, 2017.
45 “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Takes #NODAPL to the United Nations,” Indian Law Resource Center, September 20, 2016, http://indianlaw.org/undrip/Standing-Rock-Sioux-Tribe-Takes-NODAPL-to-the-United-Nations.
46 Rosalyn R. LaPier, “Here's What No One Understands About the Dakota Access Pipeline Crisis,” Washington Post, November 4, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/04/heres-what-no-one-understands-about-the-dakota-access-pipeline-crisis/?utm_term=.0b2b6b8ef50d.
47 Stibbe, “An Ecolinguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies,” 118.
48 Stibbe, Ecolingustics, 35.
49 Ibid.
50 Fairclough, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” 134.
51 Ibid., 127.
52 Stibbe, Ecolingustics, 30.
53 Mendoza and Kinefuchi, “Two Stories, One Vision,” 288–91.
54 Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 8.
55 Thompson, “Anthropocentrism: Humanity as Peril and Promise,” 86.
56 Stibbe, Ecolingustics, 33.
57 Dennis Martinez, Enrique Salmón, and Melissa K. Nelson, “Restoring Indigenous History and Culture to Nature,” in Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, ed. Melissa K. Nelson (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2008), 88–115.
58 Ibid., 92.
59 Four Arrows (aka Donald Trent Jacobs), Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2016), 6–7.
60 “NPR Ratings at All-Time High,” NPR, March 15, 2017, http://www.npr.org/about-npr/520273005/npr-ratings-at-all-time-high, accessed April 29, 2017.
61 Rebecca Hersher, “Key Moments in the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight,” NPR, February 22, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/22/514988040/key-moments-in-the-dakota-access-pipeline-fight, accessed April 28, 2017.
62 Trymaine Lee, “No Man's Land: The Last Tribes of the Plains,” MSNBC, n.d., http://www.msnbc.com/interactives/geography-of-poverty/nw.html, accessed November 10, 2017.
63 Fairclough and Wodak, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” 278.
64 Mendoza and Kinefuchi, “Two Stories, One Vision,” 279–88; Kremer and Jackson-Paton, Ethnoautobiography.
65 Halualani and Nakayama, “Critical Intercultural Communication Studies,” 3.
66 Mendoza and Kinefuchi, “Two Stories, One Vision,” 288–91.
67 Ruth Wodak, “What CDA Is About—A Summary of Its History, Important Concepts and Its Developments,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 9.